Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  Had Nubby lost he would have ceased to be judge of the tank, and fines would have been collected by Bastard rather than himself.

  After a while Nubby made a bandage for Bastard out of the shirt that had been tom in two. He daubed the blood off the boy’s hair with a wet rag and tied the bandage neatly around. In return Bastard gave Nubby a shirt of his own to compensate for that one he had ruined; and an hour later he began on Nubby’s laundry. In the morning he hung Nubby’s spoon. Cass marveled at this turn of affairs, until night came. When night came Nubby left his own blanket and went into Bastard’s cell.

  And Creepy Edelbaum lay on his back, smiling crookedly up. In an undertone, with a jerk of the thumb, Nubby assured Cass that Creepy would become increasingly jealous of Mr Bastard, and that when Creepy and Bastard both recovered, there would be a grand fight.

  Although Joe Spokes would not tolerate a severe kangarooing of any white and Protestant American, he permitted the court to make the most of Negroes and Mexicans. Since Nubby was treasurer of the court as well as judge, such permission implied the right to take anything or everything that a Mexican might possess and to beat him into the bargain. Funds went straight into Nubby’s pocket, and were never seen again. Consequently every black or brown boy brought in was, for Nubby, “fresh meat an’ fish,” as he himself termed it. In return for Spokes’ permission Nubby acted as stool. Spokes kept him in tobacco and stamps, and he answered whatever questions Spokes put to him.

  Cass awoke one winter night, and out in the corridor the nightlight burned dimly. Bars stood against the light straightly and tall. Cass heard the sounds that men make in sleep. At first he did not know what had waked him. Then Raridon, a boy in for vagrancy, shrilled out suddenly into the stillness.

  “Judge! Nubby! Wake up! Fresh meat an’ fish fer you!”

  Keys jangled and feet came pounding. Cass ran out into the bull-pen with the others as the great bolt clicked.

  Mr Bastard, scratching himself in underwear, mumbled sleepily for only Nubby to hear, “If it really is meat this time I just hope the judge’ll buy us some real meat with the dough. I’m g-gittin’ plum sick o’ living’ on t-turnips an’ c-cabbage all the time.” Then the jumble of their voices stilled, for they heard Joe Spokes speaking on the other side of the door. They listened with their ears cupped to the wall. They could hear Joe Spokes laughing.

  “He’s friskin’ him now,” Nubby whispered, “he must’ve found somethin’ valooble on him or he wouldn’t be laughin’.” The outer door opened and Spokes shoved in a Mexican boy in ragged knee-breeches.

  “Mejicano!’” he ordered, “Aqui, Mejicano.”

  It always took Big Joe longer to open the tank door than it did to open the outer doors. The door to the tank was opened by an air brake locked in a box on the outer wall, and the key to the box, much smaller than his other keys, usually eluded him for a minute. His inevitable remark to the boys as he fumbled for this key was, “Got to be awful keerful with you men t’night. Pris’ners is smarter’n sheriffs ye know.”

  But Joe did not say this this time, though all of them waited to hear.

  All Joe did this time was to wink at Nubby as he went out, after the Mexican was inside with them. Nubby winked back, the door slammed, retreating keys jangled; then all stood silent, heads down and listening, till the last great door closed down below and no sound could come through. Nubby’s grin came off then as though it had come off for all time.

  “Court’s in session,” he announced. “Sheriff, bring in yer man.”

  The play-pretend of the underdogs aping the wolves on top, the man-child game at once so terrible and so ludicrous had begun again in tank ten.

  Their prisoner was small and lithe; he faced the court with a friendly white grin. Nubby handed Raridon the rules of the court; Raridon was bailiff by virtue of his being able to read. His voice sounded like a small boy’s reciting in a classroom. Nubby frowned a heavy self-import.

  “These are the rules of the kangaroo court. Any man found gilty of braking into this jailhouse without consent of the inmates will be fined two dollars or elts spend forty days on the floor at rate of five cents a day, or elts he will take fifty-five licks on the fanny and get the thing over with. Every man entering this tank must keep cleaned and properly dressed. Each day of the week is wash day excep’ Sunday. Every man must wash his face and hands before handling food. Any man found gilty of spitting in ash tub or through window will be given twenty licks on rectum west. Each and every man using toilet must flush with bucket immediately after’s. Man found gilty of violation gets twenty-five licks on rectum east. Throw all paper in the coal tub. Don’t draw dirty pictures on the wall, you may have your sister come visit. When using dishrag keep it clean. Any man caught stealing from inmate of this tank gets 500 belt-licks on both rectums. Every man upon entering this tank with a vener’al disease, lice, buboes, crabs or yello glanders, must report same immed’ately. Any man found violating any of these rules will be punished according to the justice of the court.

  “Anything not said here will be decided by the justice of this court. The judge of the court can search everywhere. He can search anybody. The judge could be treasurer too, if he wanted. The judge is Judge O’Neill.”

  Joe Spokes’ son had written all this for Nubby, in a large hand; and the Mexican boy had understood not a word of it all. His face showed that not only had he failed to understand, but that in all probability he had never been in a jailhouse before. Cass surmised that Spokes had pulled him off a boxcar for the sake of the feed-bill.

  “Me Ilamo Salomon Rivera, pero me dicen ‘El Diamante Negro’—si.”

  After delivering himself of this the boy laughed pleasantly up at them all. Cass interpreted: “He says his name is Salomon Rivera, but folks call him ‘The Black Diamond.’”

  When Nubby began searching, the boy showed no sign of fear; obligingly, he turned out his pockets to assist the hunt. The pockets were full of holes; through one a firm brown thigh showed. In his stetson and boots, but with neither shirt nor pants on, Nubby looked, beneath the dim nightlight, like something at night in a madhouse. He searched everywhere, but found not even so much as a nickel sack of tobacco. He ripped open the lining of the boy’s cap.

  “Sometimes you could find somethin’ valooble som’eres,” he said, “fifty or a hunerd dollars or a diamond ring maybe.”

  He could not believe that there was nothing to be found, and drew off his belt.

  “Savvy this?” he asked, dangling the belt before the boy and adding in an undertone to the others, “there’s more’n one way t’ make a cholo talk.” He swung back on his heel as though about to strike with the strap. The boy whitened then, and with one swift gesture yanked off his shirt and handed it to Nubby. A gift. Nubby hung it between the bars of his cell and pointed to the ragged breeches. Without hesitation the boy obeyed. Nubby hung the pants beside the shirt. Then he looked around him; and the belts closed in.

  And now the long beating began, with only the cold bars listening. Cass closed his eyes, feeling tired and ill. Each bar had a cold and watching face, each bar stood singly and alone. It seemed to Cass there was no sound now in the whole world save the crash of a leather belt on flesh in El Paso County jail. There was only an indrawn breath in all the world to hear. And a low, indrawn sobbing. In the silence between the lashes he had a smell as of something burning in his nostrils; at first he did not know what it was. Then he realized that it was blood which he smelled, and the old weakness came upon him so that he had to grasp bars tightly, in both hands, to keep from fainting. The Mexican boy began to cry out whenever a belt came down; but his head jerked forward with every blow so that the cry came forth half-choked. The flesh on his buttocks became black and blue; then one raw red strip hung down. Raridon held his head to steady him against the impact of Nubby’s blows.

  “Hold ’is head down there!” Nubby roared like a bronk-buster whenever the boy stumbled forward; “If you can’t ride ’im I can!”
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  While Nubby flogged, the others stood in a dull-faced line behind him, a belt in each one’s hand, each waiting his turn. Like sand-lot semi-pros at batting practice. Creepy counted shrilly, from where he lay.

  At his forty-fourth count Nubby’s arm weakened, but he finished out his fifty, and Raridon took his place. Cass then moved into the position of head-holder, and Nubby kept the count. Raridon was a stronger boy than he appeared. Although his wrists were thin as pipe-stems, his palms were broad and his arms were long, so that he needed no large muscle to inflict wholesale havoc now. Then, somehow, it was Cass’s turn, and everyone was looking at him, and Nubby was looking closest of all.

  It did not seem possible to Cass to strike the helpless boy; and yet, in a half-daze before Nubby’s glare, he found himself unloosening his belt. Mr Bastard stepped back to give him a little more room.

  “Oh, boy,” Raridon chuckled in anticipation—“Boy oh boy—watch this ugly red-head bear down on Mexy’s arse now. Start funkin’, Mexy! Yore arse is goin’ clean through the floor in a second!”

  Cass swung lightly the first three times. One hundred and one; one hundred and two; one hundred and three. And three times was all that he did swing lightly.

  “Hold it!” Nubby barked. “Stop right there. It’s what I been suspishunin’ ever since you bust in here—yer a Mexikunlover, that’s what. You love ’em just like you do niggers an’ yer sentence is unsuspended right off. So get down in his place now ’fore I beat yer belly blue with a boot instead of a belt.”

  The Mexican boy stumbled nakedly onto his blanket and lay there crying softly. For a moment, as he bent over with his own buttocks exposed, Cass was secretly proud that he had not swung hard like the others. Then the belt came down, and he was all regret. Mr Bastard was beating him, and Nubby was holding his head; every time the leather came down he pinched Cass’s ears and gritted between clinched teeth:

  “Mexikun-lover, Mexikun-lover. Nigger-Mexikun-nigger-lover.’

  In the minutes that followed pain taught Cass that he must never again treat a black man or a brown as he would a white.

  Nubby released him after twenty-five lashes.

  “Can’t be too hard on you, son,” he explained, “bein’ as we’re trav’lin’ t’gether.” He tossed Cass a ready-made cigarette and added, “but it just goes to show you how tricky them spiks can be. You took twenty-five lashes fer that pepper-bellied lascar and now I’ll betcha my shirt he won’t give you so much as a single bite of cornbread fer doin’ it, wait an’ see.”

  On the first morning after the beating Nubby told Cass to return the boy’s shirt and breeches, still hanging between the bars of Nubby’s cell. Cass found Salomon lying naked and shivering; he leaped to his feet when he saw his clothes, begging Cass humbly with outstretched hands. As the boy put his clothes on Cass saw blood dried on the floor of the cell. He himself had not bled. An hour later breakfast came up, and Salomon came limping into Cass’s cell with two chunks of cornbread in his hand. Without a word he laid these in Cass’s lap, and left. Cass divided with Nubby, and Nubby said not a word.

  Nubby was well satisfied with himself. He had put down an insurrection, he had secured himself a new boy, he had shown a Mexican who was boss in tank ten, and he had given a white man an excellent object lesson on evils of Mexican-loving. Later in the morning Salomon sang:

  Una noche serena y oscura

  Cuando en silencio juramos los dos

  . . . Las estrellas, el sol, y la luna . . .

  Creepy and Mr Bastard had never been in jail before; both were in their middle teens. Nubby O’Neill was twenty-eight and had done time in two state penitentiaries. He had lost his hand working on a conveyor in a reform school in Southern Illinois when he was thirteen, and since that time had divided his life between West Texas and Chicago. One day Joe Spokes brought him a copy of Zane Grey, and Nubby sat cross-legged with the book for a week; he read with a painful slowness. Then, on a Friday night, he finished the last page and declared it to have been an excellent story. Indeed he grew so enthusiastic over Riders of the Purple Sage that he forbade Salomon to sing any more of his “Chilli-fartin’ cholo songs.”

  “Amerikun songs is all what’s sung in number ten tank from this day on,” he announced, and gave Salomon to understand by waving both his book and his belt at the boy.

  After that Salomon was silent from morning till night; but Nubby substituted for him by singing them all a song he claimed was his own. It was, he declared, a “real Amerikun song—an’ I call it the Blind Child.”

  They tell me that tonight, papa

  You wed another bride,

  That you would clasp her in the room

  Where my poor mother died,

  That you would bid her press a kiss

  Upon your throbbing brow

  Like she my own dear mother did—

  Papa, you’re weeping now.

  Nubby’s offense, indecent exposure, made him the only actual malefactor in the tank; the others were all more petty offenders. Creepy, Mr Bastard, Raridon and Salomon had been pulled out of boxcars for the sake of the feed-bill; the jail officials received sixty cents a day from the county for each prisoner. This sum left such ample margin for profit that when every tank was not full to capacity the officials felt that they were losing money with every passing day.

  And every passing day brought hunger, till hunger was a living wound in the gut. For Cass, as with the others, the fact of confinement greatly intensified pain: there was nothing to do, nothing to do. Nothing to do but to listen to the wolf howling behind your navel.

  It was so in all jails, in those of the North as well as the South, in Dakota or Ohio the same as in Texas. Every day the boy Salomon complained quietly, always half to himself. “Yo tengo hambre, companeros,” he whimpered, as though he thought they were all somehow concealing food from him.

  Cass gripped bars in both hands and listened to his bowels grumbling. His belly was still there all right, but it felt as Hat and as thin as though somebody had been stomping upon it. Somebody stomping in boots as sharp as his father’s had been; as pointed as Nubby’s had become.

  It grew cold in the jail. By standing atop the thundermug the boys could see a cold rain falling. At night they slept in all their clothes and wrapped their blankets about their heads despite hordes of lice. In the afternoons, when the tank was the warmest, they pursued lice across the blankets with burning matches. When a louse was caught he crackled once, and died.

  Two days after he had regained his feet, Creepy caught the nettle hives. His body became one itching mass from toe to head. All day and night he scratched himself furiously, his mouth clenching and jerking into a thousand agonized shapes. When Spokes’ boy came up with the meal-tray Creepy opened his shirt and showed the boy his chest. A livid red rash covered both breasts and ran down to the navel.

  “Ah’ll tell paw,” the boy promised after having satisfied his curiosity by touching the rash through the bars.

  In the evening Spokes came in carrying a small spray-gun, in appearance like a fire-extinguisher, and offered to spray Creepy with it. The spray was used as a disinfectant and rat-killer, so Spokes thought it only fair to give Creepy warning.

  “It’ll singe yore hide a mite, but it’ll cure it ah reck’n,” he assured Creepy. Creepy declined, for he had witnessed the spray-gun’s potency against vermin, and his rash did not happen to be itching him at the moment.

  But a minute after Spokes had left he began scratching again. Nubby, watching from a distance, took the occasion to cheer the boy’s spirits.

  “There’s a sunny side to everythin’, Legs,” he said. “See, you can’t quit scratchin’ long enough now to fool with yerself, so maybe you’ll get to be a real man soon; if you stay sick long enough. It’s a silver linin’ you want to took for, Legs, not always the gloomy side.”

  Sometimes Cass fancied that he would never get out of jail, that something would happen to him and he would never see sun and daylight again.
After three weeks in the place he could no longer imagine himself as being free, so strange a thing did liberty then seem. Something would happen: he would catch some strange disease on the thundermug and die before the week was out; or Joe Spokes would be shot by a Mexican and the county clerk would misplace the records. Then he would grow old in this jail, and would never be free again.

  At such moments of doubt the wolf in Cass’s belly seemed to howl out of hate as well as from hunger.

  But when your belly starts crawling up the inside of your neck, just to see if your mouth is still there, a long drink of water will push it down for a while. Warm water is best, and the boys heated a gallon every morning, after their meager cornbread breakfast. They made a small fire in the corner of Raridon’s cell, fanned off the smoke so that those downstairs would smell nothing, and drank it before it cooled off. Cass drank warm water in the El Paso County jail until, like the others, he became diarrheal.

  In the last week of February he came to his twentieth year.

  He made a calendar on the wall: twenty-one days became twenty-three; he had sixty-seven to go. Then, sixty-six.

  He thought he would never be free again. But Nubby sang every day for him; he passed whole hours listening to the tinny din of Nubby’s nasal tenor:

  On a cozy little chain gang, on a dusty southern road

  My late-lamented pappy had his perm-unent abode.

  Now some was there fer stealin’, but my daddy’s only fault

  Was an overwhelmin’ weakness fer crim-inal assault.