Over the brim of his cup he regarded a squat and foreign appearing fellow valiantly struggling with that with which he had himself struggled. For some reason the man kept tilting his plate on a level with his eyes, first to one side and then to the other, as though unable to make up his mind about something. He did this three times while Cass watched, till the brown-yellow soup began stopping over the edge and the thing in the middle began walking, as though on very short legs, about the periphery of the tin. He set it down quite carefully then, and with a deliberated accuracy spat in the plate’s center. Then he rose from the bench to flee for coffee, belching hugely as he fled.
Cass drained his cup and rose to ieave the Jesus-Feeds-All mission, but at the door he learned that to pay for his meal he would have to chop wood in the yard for a while. This did not take him longer than twenty minutes; when he was through his hunger had returned. He resolved to give the alleys a try before returning to the mission. He could only get one more meal in the place anyhow. The “Jesus-Feeds-All” mission served no one man more than twice, if he were transient. After two meals you went somewhere else. And “somewhere else” was down the nearest alley.
Beside Cass, as he found the street, the squat-necked man fell into step. He walked with his fists jammed in his pockets and his cap pulled low over his eyes; for a minute he said nothing.
“Looks like a hunky,” Cass thought. “If it weren’t fo’ furriners times’d be better.”
“Are you a hunky, fella?” he asked.
The fellow replied in a voice so broken and guttural that at first Cass could not quite understand.
“No, not hunky. Litvak from Memel is all. You know? Carl Jusitska, that is my name.”
Then Carl Jusitska spoke of his life as they walked. He had once been a steel-worker in Latvia, a place somewhere in Europe, and there he had had a wife and four boy-children. Today he did not know where this family was, because of a red-haired man who had come one day to the rolling mill where he had worked. The red-haired one was an American, and the foreman brought him into the yard where Carl was sitting among other workers, all eating dinners from tin dinner pails. The foreman had told his men that they must all listen hard, for this was a wise man he had brought, even though the wise one did not use the tongue very well. So each man listened hard as he was able; and the American told them young workers were needed in Dee-troit, a place somewhere in America. AH workers who came there would receive such fine wages that very soon after they arrived each man would send for his wife and his family and all his small brothers to come to Dee-troit also. And when he told how much money each man would earn in that far place the men were a little suspicious; they could scarcely believe. Carl had been a little suspicious too, but the more he thought it over the truer it all had sounded. Then the red-haired one had finished speaking abruptly and had gone swiftly away; no one knew where to exactly, he was not seen again anywhere. And the more Carl had thought it over the truer it all had sounded. He had come to America, and had sent for his family.
“For one year I am scab,” he said, “I get reech. Not unnerstan’. Then unnerstan’: I am scab. I join oonion. I strike, I am fire. No joostice. I am poor once more.” He pushed back his cap and pointed to a line of gray about his temples. “See, I get old in thees America. No monies anymore, anywhere. You tink Mary gone home? You tink where I could find she?”
Cass walked a little faster. He didn’t like hunkies.
To their left, for a block, loomed a long low factory, silent now where machines once rumbled. Its windows had been broken out, there was nothing inside now save silence and rust.
“Mebbe Matvey Karskoff send Mary monies to come home to Memel. Mebbe Mary take such monies an’ go. Matvey like Mary for long long time.”
Cass was hungry. He was cold. He didn’t like hunkies. He wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“Look”—Carl took his shoulder so fiercely that he had to stop. “Look, ked—we eat togedder, leev togedder, sleep togedder—everee night for twelve long year—an’ now no more. Wonse in ol’ time, long time, time afore we marry, Mary say, ‘’Oney you is what I lof.’ Because Mary say thees ting to me we marry. Now—no more. Now when it get night I tink Mary in bed wit Matvey. I look in many windows to see. In same bed I tinkin’—windows, houses, rooms inside wit’ beds. So walk, walk, all night walk. Same bed, Mary. Same bed, Matvey.”
Cass took the hand off his shoulder. He wanted something to eat, right away. He saw the swart alien face a foot from his own, and for one second he wanted to hurt it, to strike it between the eyes so that it would cry out quickly and strike back blindly. He wanted to kick it till it bled. He wanted to see its mouth broken in with pain.
“Git along, bum,” he said. “Whyn’t you go back where you come from?”
Carl Jusitska turned swiftly and went off in the opposite direction. His hip bumped and scraped the bricks of the factory’s wall as he went, as though he could no longer see clearly the street whereon he walked. Cass’s eyes followed till the man from Memel was lost in an eddying swirl of traffic. Then Cass tightened the thin and greasy cord that held up trousers once his brother’s, and he listened to the protesting grumble of wind within his bowels. In a slow glissade his stomach caved in and turned halfway over—it seemed for one moment that he had no stomach at all, only a head going up like a balloon, buzzing and bounding through space up and up, till it burst in a bubble of blackness and left him standing with his back braced tensely against the bricks of the wall. His eyes felt dry, with a burning and granular dryness.
“Ah’m really hungry now,” he thought, and the thought frightened him, for in this city men could not beg on the streets even covertly.
He tried mooching twice. The first moochee gave him a half hlled sack of tobacco. But the second looked around for the law, and Cass ran into an alley. He went down the alley only a little way, and he came to a grab-can where the coal-oil had dried.
Now came the night-hours, when men walked up and down. All night Cass went through streets and alleyways, smelling and pawing and stooping over.
“Look!” (His belly seemed now to whisper its need.) “Look in that big can, down below.” He tried to turn the can on end, to dump its refuse out, but he lacked strength. So he dug deep down, blindly groping beside high-piled ashes till his fingers sank into something soft and warm. When he pulled his hand out it was caked to the wrist, with human dung.
Cass did not feel disgust this time. He saw his hand with eyes which were dry and burning, and no longer capable of disgust. He smelled, with a nose which nothing could now offend. He scraped his fingers halfheartedly against ashes and fence. And Belly whispered, “Look! Look behind the ashes!” But there was nothing behind the ashes to eat, there was nothing there save a few drifted leaves. So Cass sat down on the leaves, between the high-piled ashes and the fence, and he pulled his cap down low over his eyes, and he slept.
Early the following morning he went into a small bakery on Durango Street, to beg for bread. The woman behind the counter looked at him for one moment as though she thought he might strike her; and then she looked sorry for having thought that. But she had just given the last of the old stuff to the mission, she said. “The-Jesus-Feeds-All mission. ’Cause that’s where they’re feedin’ the homeless now, an’ it’s where you ought to go.”
Half an hour later, in the rear of a delicatessen on Zarzamora Street, Cass pulled a half-loaf of raisin bread out of a can. Save for one small corner, it was untouched by coal-oil. In the bottom of its crust were small toothmarks, so that he did not eat all the way down despite his hunger.
“Ah’d like to get me tattooed sometime,” Cass planned as he gnawed in the alley.
A while later Cass had a great piece of luck. He found a head of lettuce the inner leaves of which were still fresh and green. That was luck. It was in back of a fruit store that that happened, and he hung around the place for an hour after the finding in the hope of another head. A boy came out of the store carrying a
crate of bananas, but he put the crate on a wagon, and he hauled the wagon to the corner, and then he turned that corner out of sight.
On the evening of Cass’s second day in San Antonio the garbage cans were sprayed again. So it was then time to be moving on.
He had had his fill of San Antonio. Or rather, not his fill.
He returned to his wheelless passenger coach and found two men sleeping where he had slept. When they wakened he jungled up with them over a fire near the Soupline tracks. Both men were older than himself, and they seemed unwilling to speak much to him. But they gave him potatoes and coffee and a cut of plug-tobacco. Toward midnight a westbound stock-run began humming the rails, and all three rose from their fire to go. Cass saw the headlight a mile down the track, heard her working steam with the brake-shoes slack. Then she whistled, once, the headlight began growing larger every second—and he raced with the other ’boes to catch her before she gained such speed as to make catching difficult or impossible. He swung up a ladder, cracked a seal—and dove.
It was warm in the reefer with the other two. They pulled the trap down over their heads, shoved a spike in the lock to prevent the trap locking, and slept.
Hours later, under floodlights far ahead, Cass saw six bulls in slickers come out of a Harvey Café. They walked limned sharply against those lights; they laughed as they went toward the tracks. Across the thunder of approaching wheels their laughter, like six bells in storm, tinkled thin and silvery. As the first car rolled beneath the lights the first of the bulls swung himself up its ladder; climbing, his body swayed and powerfully flexed as though on hips forged of rock and rubber. Then easily as five jungle-cats, with the same steel swing of rock-and-rubber torsoes, the others followed and advanced.
All six were young men; they were all of them hard. The one who led drew a flashlight; the others gripped small colts. Their high-heeled boots had steel-spiked soles that they might not slip on the icy spine.
Other men saw.
A quarter of a mile away, from where they crouched on a rocking roof, they saw and ran. Caps yanked low over their foreheads, bodies bent in challenge to the slant rain beating, bums raced down the narrow spine away from the men who walked in light. The cars were coated with ice and rain, they ran in mist and a swaying dark. The planking, as though in alliance against them with rain and bulls, kept buckling beneath their feet. Between cars a four-foot gap—no time to measure gaps tonight—just jump! Already the Hood-beams were bathing the cars that made up the train’s center section. “Jump you lame-leg son of a bitch, jump or we’ll shove y’over.”
At the side, autos waited. The six on the top shagged the ’boes down the side, into the arms of their deputies. The bounty on bums was a dollar a head here; the detectives split with their aides. No use playing ’possum tonight, lousers—deputy’s baby needs new shoes.
Some of the bums huddled stubbornly in reefer pits, thinking no bull would trouble to come down after—even when a flashray made their darkness bright. Such a bum didn’t know what a bull was getting just for climbing down in after him. And when a bull did come down it went worse with the bum. Working methodically and with devastating thoroughness the police yanked men out of reefers like dish rags out of deep sinks. Then, with a car packed to the hood, with a deputy on each running board and a constable on the fender, they raced toward the city with sirens blasting the January sky. The only chance a ’bo had was to keep traveling back in the hope that by the time the last cars came under the lights the train would have gained such speed as to force the bulls to abandon it.
Cass heard the wheels begin a steadily-rising roar.
The homeless had a special fear of this place. It was here, near Uvalde City, that the hungriest jailhouse and the crudest bulls in all southern Texas were located. There had been an epidemic in the place, and its fame had spread among transients far and wide as a place sedulously to be avoided.
Racing against the racing wheels, the bums ran toward the cab’s green light. Fifty feet down one narrow board—a blind leap then into rocking space—and fifty feet to the unseen gap once more. Through fog Cass saw the green sidelight eight cars ahead. Someone behind kept treading his heels, and one ahead was lame. Then the dark split, and the men in hoods were bearing down. Men on the cab car! “Jump you club-foot son of a bitch, you’re holding all of us back.” The deputies appeared to the ’boes like an army with flashlights approaching through mist—bums veered and stumbled, Lame-Leg missed, and the others saw, and the wheels went up and the wheels went down; and four raced ahead where there had been five. When the bulls started firing, none of the transients paused; two got to a ladder and scrabbled away into mist. One flung himself over the side and then lay very still till they picked him up. Cass ran on—till steel clanged against steel inches to his left. Then he flung himself blindly down a reefer pit, grabbed cold iron as he dropped, and let go with both hands.
His fall was broken. Feet first he smashed down onto a softness. He thought of dead men, of snakes and of dung—“Who’s in here?” he asked, looking down at the thing on the floor at his feet. There was no reply. He saw a girl or a woman, he couldn’t tell which, with something or someone dim bending over. Then a match scratched, and a voice called out. He saw a Negro face two feet from his own, then the match died, and the calling ceased; there was no sound then above that of the wheels.
“Whyn’t she git out o’ mah way, ’stead o’ layin’ stretched out right in mah way?” Cass asked. He discerned the face on the floor. The woman was white.
“Now you sure done it. Skwar down on her belly you hit, wid her belly big uz a barrel.” The Negro flapped his lips hurriedly, one on top of the other; his voice was that of a northern Negro. “White boy, you ort git slapped clean to Jesus.”
To Cass it was all unreal as nightmare, for the thing had happened too quickly to be understood clearly. He had only run from men who were enemies; but apparently he had just killed two poor reefer-bums, a woman and the child she carried.
The Negro cupped a brief flare, in the basket of his hands, over the face of the stricken bum. When her eyes opened he asked, “How are yo’? Are yo’ hurt bad, yo’ think?” For reply her eyes shifted accusingly to Cass’s sooty phiz bending above her. His face had eyes that seemed almost closed now, and a mouth like that of a small boy getting ready to cry. “I know who to blame for this all right,” her eyes seemed to say to Cass.
“Ah’m right sorry, Miss,” Cass said, feeling genuinely solicitous for the small white face on the floor. He saw that she was a girl in her twenties. Her face was pimpled, and coated with coal dust; on the left side of the throat ran a twisted pink scar tissue, like a scar left by scalding water. He saw her clutching at her pain till she tore her skirt at the crotch; he thought of the black girl left alone on the prairie. “Ah’m always doin’ wrong,” he thought. “Sometimes ah mean it an’ sometimes ah don’t.” He felt a helpless bewilderment. Then he looked again at the girl, to where her fingers clutched her pain, and all his innards seemed suddenly to sag . . . blood was there slowly, at the deep seam there, darkening blue cloth. Her fingers fumbled where pain like a burning girdle bound her now; the dark matting between her thighs was becoming dyed with a red wetness. The match flickered out.
The Negro spoke sharply.
“Take her head, I’ve got her feet. We’ve got to get her out of this hole perty damned pronto.” The acrid odor of blood rose pungently in the rocking chamber.
When Cass lifted her head she began screaming again; and frightened as though a dead woman had screamed, he fell forward and almost dropped her. He braced his back against the steel screening, and shut his eyes for a moment to steady himself. The screening was wet with snow or rain; the car was rolling fast.
“Quick! We’re pullin’!”
In the tiny chamber the Negro’s voice rang and reechoed. Cass fancied that in the darkness then the womb of this girl was already opening, gaping red and terribly.
He had never seen a child born, he had
always feared to be near such a sight. His fingers, weak like a drunkard’s fingers, kept slipping and fumbling about her neck as though momently he might let her fall. He had no strength left. From hunger and idleness his hands had become hands of cotton. The Negro flung the woman over his shoulder much as one would a half-filled flour sack, and in a wink of an eye was clinging by one hand to the grating’s top; he began butting the trap-door with the back of his head.
“Should ah come up theah an’ open it fo’ yo’, mister?” Cass asked.
With one sharp and peremptory push of the head, the trap flew back wide to the sky. Slant rain flecked again into Cass’s face, into his eyes and down his ears. The Negro and the woman were gone. Cass imagined them, over his head working cautiously back, the black man bent and swaying beneath the burden . . .
Minutes later shadows darkened the opening over Cass’s head. The Negro was coming down once more, and the woman’s arms were about him. From his shoulder her face descended reproachfully on Cass. Cass stood looking up with hair in his eyes, understanding that it was too late—too late because he had made it too late. When he reached the floor the Negro brushed Cass aside.
Somebody in Boots Page 15