Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  “Couldn’t make it. Couldn’t take a chance the way she’s moving now. Have to wait till she slows, that’s all.”

  Cass climbed the grating to close the heavy trap. He tugged manfully, but he was weak as noodle-water, and the swinging hood seemed to weigh more like a thousand pounds than the one hundred and fifty that it was. Then recalling with something of shame what the Negro had done without use of his arms, Cass strove heroically; with both fists he caught hold and strained frantically upward till it actually came halfway—then his fingers seemed to melt, the hood balanced for one split second above him, he ducked—and it crashed. There came a small click from the outside then; and the reefer was black as pitch.

  The Negro started climbing when that small click came. Cass watched from below with a desperate hope.

  “You ort to get slapped clean back to wherever you come from,” the Negro called down, and descended as quickly as he had gone up. Cass didn’t have to be told what he’d done.

  Slam a steel reefer all night from inside, nobody walking the spine will hear. Shout till you’re hoarse and beat the sides with a shoe, nobody outside will hear a sound. Might as well just lie still, save your breath, hope for luck. Maybe they’ll unload the car at the next division point; maybe a brakie will look down in. Maybe he saw you jump down and knows all the time that you’re sealed there. Maybe someone else saw; maybe a yardman or maybe the shack; maybe some bull or maybe some switchman. Maybe a hostler will peer down and say, “Did we have you scared for a minute, boys?”

  And maybe you’ll stand for three weeks on a siding and get shipped three times across the state of Texas before someone looks down in. But by then it’s a little late of course. More than one brakeman has opened a reefer long-sealed to find on its floor just two shoes, a rag, and one skeleton.

  The wheels roared, rails sang and a long smoke poured. To Cass it seemed that the wheels were singing a song full of mockery. “Ho! Ho! We were waiting lang. Ho! Ho! We’ve caught three more. Lousers, lousers—caught three more!” The wheels ground to a stop, waited like live things very still; and then, with monotonous mockery, rolled on.

  It was cold in the reefer. Cold and dark. Cass measured the night by the times that the wheels stopped. Measured the hours by the song the wheels sang. The woman slept. This was Del Rio perhaps, perhaps Sanderson. In the musty air of the chamber the smell of the white woman and the smell of the black man mixed. The woman had an odor faintly like something sour; the Negro smelled salty-sweet. Cass felt his head wobbling with weariness, then the Negro said, “Matches.” He was standing above Cass with his shirt unbuttoned; Cass stood up quickly to find him a match. As he fumbled he was surprised to notice that the Negro was only a boy no older than himself.

  “Here—matches.”

  The Negro took off his shirt to make a pillow for the woman’s head. Squatting, he tore the lining out of his shoe and made a torch of it in the second before the match failed. The woman looked up in terror, and then pain pulled her mouth into an oblong “O.” Cass cringed at her howling. It was as though he were being struck for what he had done. He held the torch above her, and it trembled in his hand. The Negro wiped a jack-knife on an unclean rag . . .

  The thing which Cass saw cut free that night in the S. P. reefer chamber looked like nothing so much as a length of pink sausage at first. Then it went black all over and looked like nothing at all. Holding it awkwardly, the rude torch burning in his hand, Cass felt that he held so much filth. He had a crazy desire to touch the small flame to the thing, to stomp it down into the cracks of the flooring, into the darkness there. He wrapped it in a wet newspaper instead, and he laid it down in the corner.

  The Negro tried to staunch the woman with his cap. The floor became a cess-pen running with blood, stinking of urine and strewn with rags. When Cass touched the rain-wet screening he fancied he touched blood even there. Once, being either too dazed to turn her head or too weak to lift it, she vomited down her own breast. Pieces of stuff dribbled from the corners of her mouth. Trying to retch a second time, her head merely bobbed weakly. Cass saw that her right eye kept crossing, being too weak to focus.

  “She ain’t hardly no older’n me or you,” he said to the Negro. And now the woman became so quiet and still Cass thought for one moment that she were dead. Then her mouth gaped, slowly, and she began to breathe heavily. Cass sank into the corner opposite with the thing wrapped in paper. The pit began to stink as though a dozen mangy curs had drenched the door knee-deep.

  Once in the night the mother woke, and the Negro asked Cass for the matches once more.

  Cass said, “Here—Matches,” thus giving the other a nick-name along with the box.

  In the corner the child, dead as decay, moved with the long car’s swaying. Sometimes it seemed to raise itself, sometimes it rolled toward the wall. Once, when the car buckled violently, it worked whole inches toward him just as though it lived. Cass thought then that, it being so strangely dead, it knew whom to blame for its death. He felt that it would crawl like that soon again, that in hate it would bite him with small teeth like a rat’s teeth. He lacked the courage to rewrap it in the paper. He just shut his eyes, and let it bounce, and listened to its mother’s muttering. As he listened there came briefly, out of a meaningless babble, clear words.

  “I dreamed the mines were burning. I saw them all aflame. Let me go now to the place I used to be.”

  After that she fell once more into babbling; after that she slept.

  “She got on in Sabinal right before dark,” the Negro said, “I was in a empty up front when she come down the track. When I seen how she was I helped her up, an’ she gimme a cig’rette. ‘Goin’ to Laredo,’ she says, ‘ol’ man’s in the jailhouse down there again.” Then a shack come along an’ told us we’d better duck an’ stay ducked, that federal men was comin’ on in Uvalde. An’ they sure come on, didn’t they? That’s when we found this reefer. It was jest gettin’ dark then.” He talked on and on, until the words mixed in Cass’s brain into a mumbling as meaningless as the mother’s.

  With a start Cass came awake, he did not know what had waked him so suddenly; he could not return to sleep. He remained tense and strained, in spite of himself, as though he were waiting for something; he didn’t know what. His uneasiness increasing, he climbed the grating with the futile notion that the trap might not have locked after all.

  Cass recalled the other time he’d been sealed in. That had been only three months before, but it seemed now like three years. And now he could feel nothing save his own utter weariness and his own great guilt. Thirst, shame, and hunger were less now than his guilt. Every time his eyes closed and his nerves relaxed for a second, his brain leaped up shouting, “Look out! Look out! You’ll be getting a boot if you don’t look out!”

  And guilt hung like a dark stone about his neck, heavy, heavy like hunger, . . . and all utter weariness dragging him down, . . . down into . . . darkness and cold hunger, heavy, dark, down and heavy into . . .

  When the reefer was opened out from above all three slept. In the bluish light of a flash-ray a stubbled face looked mildly down. Mountain breeze with fog-laden night wind off of prairie, and a looking-down face all covered with stubbles.

  “Jeezus K. Reist. What a vile stink. What y’all been doin’ down there anyhow? Say, is thet a womern y’all got down here?”

  Matches shook the girl gently, and Cass picked up the small thing in the corner. Then, Matches and the mother first, the unnatural parade went up the grating. When the brakie saw the stillborn child in Cass’s arms, his mouth went eggshaped with amazement.

  It was yet dark night. From the roof of the car Cass saw two Mexican hostlers knocking cinders and ashes from the fire-box of a dead engine. They were dressed to the ears to keep off the heat, and fire played weirdly upon their features. Cass wondered whether the fire-box which they were cleaning was the one that had pulled them from San Antonio. If it was they had been in the reefer but six hours. He followed Matches and the br
akeman down the tracks to a little suburban freight station.

  There in the silent depot west of Ysleta they stood looking down at the suffering woman. The scar tissue on her throat had turned to a pasty gray. “It’s longer than mine, but mine went deeper,” Cass mused, holding the dead infant in one hand and tracing his own scar with the other. The brakeman put a coat beneath the mother, lying along a hardwood bench; then he walked toward the door backwards, his face still thick with wonder.

  Cass wished desperately to rid himseif of the thing in his hand; when the woman half-opened one eye he held it out to her with a tentative gesture. But the eye closed and the Negro spoke angrily, “You ought to get bounced back to where you come from, that’s what.” He took the body from Cass and wrapped it at the feet of its mother. “I’ve got to get out o’ here, now,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ else I can do, an’ I’ll sure get in deep trouble if I stay. That dumb shack’ll bring the law back with him. So you’d best scram with me, clown.” He stuffed the shirt which the girl had used for a pillow into his pocket. “Mebbe you figger on walkin’ alone?”

  The question was a challenge.

  “Well, yo’ comin’?” he persisted.

  “Yeah, ah reck’n ah’ll trot along with y’all fo’ a space,” Cass answered.

  Outside it was raining again. On either side of the tracks stretched the prairie, half-seen under fog. A cow-bell tinkled, near at hand and coming nearer. The Negro drew a battered pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered one to Cass.

  “I took ’em offn her in the depot,” he explained. “All we done for her was worth it, don’t you think? ’Speshully you.” He smiled a little at his jibe, as only very tired men smile. Cass had to grin a little too; he’d sure been a clown all right.

  “But mebbe she’ll die,” he thought, “Mebbe that feller in jail is waitin’ on her. Mebbe he was plannin’ to git out ’fore the kid was born. Mebbe . . .” He made a wry face and spat. In the darkness the spittle caught a clump of scrub cedar and hung long and whitely in mist for a moment. Then it dropped. Beside him the Negro plodded along like a sick mule in a muddy furrow. Twice they paused to light cigarettes. After they had had three apiece Cass suggested timidly, “Mebbe we ought to save some fo’ later on. Them’s the fifteen-cent-a-pack kind ah think.” The Negro walked on for several minutes before replying. Then, “Say, yo’ know why they made Camels in the first place?” he asked.

  Cass didn’t know.

  “To keep niggers an’ Jews from smokin’ Ol’ Strikes, that’s why.”

  They both laughed, without strength. It was a good joke—“Niggers an’ Jews.” You could turn the joke around if you wanted to, too, if you smoked a different kind. Only when, in his mind, Cass tried to turn it around, the thought blurred oddly and skipped away.

  Matches stopped, stood on one leg like a heron, braced one hand on Cass’s shoulder and slipped off his right shoe; the one from which he had torn the lining for a torch. He wore no socks, and Cass saw that the loot was encrusted with a brown and fish-like scale. He rubbed it with his knuckles till brownish chips brittled olf onto the S. P. ties.

  “It itches,” he said. “It itches like the crabs.”

  Cass volunteered advice: “Y’all ought to wear a white sock on that, on anythin’ like that.’

  When they reached El Paso they found the streets almost deserted. But morning was breaking over Juarez; and an empty truck came rolling by as though to herald an empty dawn. Neither knew where this city’s breadline, if any, was to be found; they walked aimlessly.

  They stopped in a doorway while Matches took off his shoe again to scrape his knuckles against his toes. Behind him, throwing a sickly greenish glow across a flight of uncarpeted stairs that led up to nowhere, an unshaded nightbulb still burned feebly. Once a woman passed the door, head down and hurrying in the rain.

  “I’m tired as a old sick hound,” Matches said as he scraped. “Aint you?” Cass said, “Yeah. Yo’ look tired kind o’. Reckon last night was a mite too much fo’ yo’. Mahself, ah ain’t been eatin’ so reg’lar o’ late.” He looked up, and there was a woman there with them, standing as though she had already been there for several minutes. Just standing beside him, looking, down at the same sick black foot at which he was looking, her face framed in a shawl and with one bright raindrop trickling down her cheek toward her open throat. A white woman, tall, smiling a strange half-smile. Under her arm were newspapers wet as her cheeks; and green flow from the nightlight bathed her head as she stood. As though his foot then were something obscene Matches thrust it hurriedly down the throat of the shoe. Cass’s eyes followed the slow raindrop down the cheek. In the long moment before it came to her throat he became conscious of his own increasing excitement. Though he did not see that throat until that drop came to it, yet his heart pounded before he saw, in anticipated horror. And both himself and Matches saw the same thing at the same moment: Pink scar tissue down the side of the neck like a scar left by scalding water—and terror hit both with one blow, they ran wildly out of the hallway and down the street.

  At the corner Matches caught up to Cass. They stood together peering back through the rain, but there was nothing behind them save the grief-stricken houses on the long Southern street; and one dark doorway looking blindly out upon a mist-wet world.

  “Holy Creepin’ Jesus, man, didn’t she look like her though?” Matches gasped. He was breathing heavily and favoring one foot as he stood. “But I only got scared ’cause you did, that’s why. I didn’t even think about that other till you turned rabbit on me like that. Holy God-’n-Jesus man, I thought I’d never catch you with this leg of mine. You shouldn’t ought to scare a fellow that way. Why, she were only some little scurve who lived in that place, that was all; even if she were scarred up a little.”

  “Ah guess mebbe ah had that other on mah mind a little still,” Cass confessed. “She sho’ gimme a turrible fright for a minute.”

  His heart was still racing; they lit the last of the cigarettes together. The morning fog was lifting, and the sun came through.

  “If I jest had a sock,” Matches complained, “a sock like you said. I think that’d keep it from rubbin’ some, don’t you? But I always get the dirty end of the stick. I shouldn’t of tore out that linin’.”

  Cass perceived that weariness had stripped his friend of the self-reliant air which he had seen in him the night before. Matches seemed, of a sudden, devoid of all will. When Cass asked him how old he was he replied, “Nineteen, I guess.”

  Cass said, “That’s how old I am too I guess.”

  They were walking down a street lined with old elms, and at the end of the street they came to a park. It had a picket fence going around and around, and swings for small girls and slides for small boys and teeter-totters for bigger children. Cass could not remember ever having seen anything quite like this park before. They found a gate and entered there.

  It was noon and growing warm. The boys found a stretch of dry ground beneath a tree, and Cass lay down. The small grass bent itself between his fingers, long shadows trembled in the light.

  “Ah’d better shake this shine,” Cass cautioned himself.

  Surreptitiously, Matches tried bathing his foot by wriggling his toes like fingers beneath the still dripping boughs of some nearby winter shrubbery. He did this a long time, then declared his foot healed and lay down beside Cass.

  “But a sock. If oney I had a sock now,” his eyes closed as he muttered, and in a moment he was sleeping soundly, one arm in a ragged sleeve outflung and the other shielding his eyes; as though even in sleep he feared to be struck.

  “Ah ought to git me a coat fo’ the night that’s cornin’,” Cass thought, watching sun-shadow between half-closed lids. Sunshadow made him think of wet lengths of yellow ribbon stretched flat aslant the grass to dry. Some lengths were narrow and some were quite wide, some intertwined and became one, then wriggled into many, all yellow-wet and delicate across green shadow-grass.

  Matches
wriggled his toes in sleep. Cass’s own feet had gone sockless for months, he too was very tired; but just as he felt himself dozing off he became aware of someone coming toward them. A silver badge above pointed boots swung up a winding cindered path twirling a club on a cord like a swagger-stick. Cass saw the boots coming, shoved Matches once and fled; from behind high shrubbery then, he watched: Boots nudged Matches till he rolled over groaning like a sick man. Sweat on his forehead gleamed in the sun, his open mouth drooled saliva in his sleep—he woke with a jerk, with his eyes bugging out. There was, for one moment, no flicker of recognition in them.

  “This is white folks’ park, nigger. Get goin’ ’fore I fan yore fanny.”

  Boots twirled his club-on-a-cord significantly, boy-fashion, threatening.

  Cass waited on the street for Matches. He’d like to josh the nigger a little now. But when Matches rejoined him they walked on in silence, and Cass said nothing at all.

  On a street lined with radios competitively blasting the air into splinters, they sat down on a Keep-Our-City-Clean box. Both were hungry enough to chew their own tongues, but they were both too weary to think consistently even about food. Cass rested his feet on the curbstone and watched the gutterflow swirl past. Much was being borne on that tide; a frayed cigar-butt came past first, then a red beer-cork; and then, its pages flung wide in a disgraceful death, a copy of Hollywood Gossip came by. It lay flat on its back, a whore-like thing. Cass sniped the cigar and the magazine, crushed tobacco onto a dry page, and rolled a rude cigarette. Smoking, he glanced at the dry pages of the magazine. One page bore a picture of Douglas Flatass, Jr. in a stove-pipe hat, hugging two girls in one-piece bathing suits. Out of this fellow Cass fashioned four long cigarettes, but the figures of the girls in the bathing suits he preserved, studying them as he smoked. A small frown came between his eyes; he squinted narrowly. Six weeks without a haircut, three weeks without a shave—he had not had a square meal for weeks and he had not slept lying down for five full days. He tossed his head back jerkily, flouncing hair out of his eyes, and he ripped one of the paper girls up the middle. He had an odd feeling when he did that; and after he had rolled another cigarette he looked through the book for more girls’ pictures. But there was no other dry page, and he began to feel more tired than ever. He offered Matches a cigarette, but the boy did not take it. He merely sat holding his kinky head in his hands, and would not even shake his head to say that he didn’t wish to smoke now.