Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  His phil-osophy was simple, it was free from moral tape—

  See-ducshun is fer sissies, but a he-man wants his rape.

  The list of daddy’s victims was em-barrasin’ly rich,

  And though one of ’em was mammy he couldn’t tell me which.

  Now I never went to college, but I got me a degree—

  I reckon I’m a model of a perfect s.o.b.

  Big Joe Spokes was a hard old man. They were all hard men. The sheriff, the deputies, judges, lawyers, and preachers: all were callous old men. They all seemed to live without deep feeling. They all knew the things that were done in the jail. They knew, and they scarcely cared. Those who cared somewhat blamed the boys themselves. These men made a hard jest out of suffering, even their own.

  “Ah think thet one-arm boy is goin’ after the stuttery one of late. Leastwise he ain’t pesterin’ the kid who’s sick no more. Well I figger thet stuttery boy got it all comin’ to him all right, he uz always too pert to suit my likin’s. Say, y’ reck’n it’ll larn him to steal rides on the Santy Fee?”

  They laughed together.

  Once, for nine days running, tank number ten lived on an oatmeal and turnip-green diet. Each boy lay on his blanket without complaint, without tears, waiting for time to pass. Sometimes from outside they heard the chimes of the First Methodist Church coming to divine service. The second Sunday in March came on the fifth day of the turnip-green diet, and all thought on that day, since it was Sunday, that there would be a small cut of meat for supper. But it was turnips again, and cornbread. They were all sickened of such thin swill, yet only Bastard had the courage to complain when Spokes came up with the meal-tray.

  “H-Holy s-sneakin-Jesus, Mister Spokes, w-when we gonna git a little s-salt pawk er good ol’ sow-belly er somethin’?”

  The boy kept trying to grin through the bars. Spokes was shoving tin troughs through to Nubby.

  At every meal it was Nubby’s self-delegated duty, as judge, to assign each man his trough. None ever presumed to take a tin until Nubby had pointed out the proper one for each to take. He was capricious in this process, and none of the boys ever knew who was going to be pointed out first, and who was going to get next to the most to eat. (It was always peculiar that, after he had appointed an eater of each ration, that it was always Nubby’s own trough which remained the one most full.) Now, as he aligned them, feigning unconcern, he calculated sharply out of one corner of his eye. Then he assigned the next to the largest to Cass, the next to Creepy, the next to Bastard, and the last to Raridon. Spokes waited until the little ritual was over. Then he answered Bastard.

  “Y’all want to come down to the commiss’ner, son?” he asked. “Y’all kin tell him what yore wearyin’ of. It’s him what got the big say-so—ah oney take his ordahs.”

  The commissioner was a county judge, as every one knew, so Cass poked Mister Bastard to make him be still. County judges were all pretty much alike. But Bastard misunderstood that nudge, and the quietness of the deputy’s voice had misled him.

  “Sh-sure would, Mister Sp-Spokes; if y’all don’t mind.”

  Spokes fumbled for the keys to the pneumatic lever a minute, and then the tank door opened slowly. Bastard stepped out into the run-around—and the keys came down like a spiked club on his head. Blood spurted from the half-healed wound back of his ear, he crashed like a blind man against the concrete wall, holding his head in his hands and gasping with shock. Spokes followed with the keys. “Thar! Larn me how to run mah jailhouse, will ye?” The keys cut into the back of the naked neck—“Thar! Tell me my own business, eh?—Now git back in yore kennel ’fore ah lose mah temper an’ cut the livin’—out o’ ye.”

  Keys do not knock a man out, but they cut and slash fearfully. Bastard stumbled to his blanket with blood from half a dozen wounds darkening the side of his face and neck. He lay down, moaned for an hour, and after a while slept.

  Cass saw the boy called Bastard sleeping. He lay on his back with his face upturned, and his face was unwashed of its blood. Two thin streams had come together to coagulate in the lacuna of the throat; to form a dark and terrible necklace there. With his every breath that dark necklace trembled, like a strung locket’s trembling. Cass looked away. He felt sick and helpless.

  “Paw shouldn’t of kicked Bry’n so hard,” he told himself.

  In the night Cass heard Bastard waken, heard him fumbling about in darkness for something.

  “He might find his trough all right,” Cass thought, “But there won’t be no turnips in it now no more.” He had seen Nubby eat half of them and forcibly feed the rest to Creepy with a spoon. Cass wondered whether the cuts that Bastard had received would leave many scars or only one. “Ah wisht mine was on back of mah neck ’stead of on mah mouth,” he thought almost jealously.

  Before that night was past Joe Spokes came up a second time. There were three deputies with him, and all were half-seas over. The boys heard them roaring together on the other side of the outer door. It was Nubby who made the proper guess:

  “They’ve raided another still, I’ll bet my breakfast with any man here. Say! Mebbe we’ll get another Mex ’legger!”

  The possibility of another thirty-dollar kangarooing caused Nubby to pull on his boots frenziedly. The other boys remained apathetic, for they knew that Nubby did not spend money for supplies any more. Nubby was saving his money, he said, to get his boots repaired when he was released. “A man like me just can’t afford to be feedin’ a hungry mob ’ike you an’ buyin’ ’em cig’rettes,” he said whenever the hint was dropped about spending some of his money.

  Nubby was disappointed that night, for Spokes brought in no prisoner. Spokes had found a still, but had lost its owner; he had come up only to let the trusty into the cell-block with the others. As he hauled down the lever in the box on the wall Cass saw that he held a bottle in his left hand. The trusty dodged past him into the cell-block, crouching in fear that Spokes might let him have the bottle over his head as he ran past.

  When Spokes tried to shove the lever up he was too drunk to raise it all the way with one hand, and he refused to give up his grip on the neck of the bottle in his fist. His deputies clustered drunkenly about him, mauling each other like playful bears, and among them they finally got the lever up into place. Spokes leaned against the wall as the door closed, and laughed a little at the boys looking solemnly out at him from their cage.

  “Say,” he asked, “where’s the monkey what took a thrashin’ this afternoon?”

  “Here, Mister Sp-Spokes,” Bastard replied obediently, coming forward into light. He was hitching up his trousers, and one side of his face was still unwashed. Big Spokes looked him up and down, an expression of amiable curiosity in his eyes.

  “Wouldn’t a shot o’ tequila make up fo’ thet beatin’, Monk?” he asked, holding the half-filled bottle out between the bars, “Ah didn’t mean to beat you bad, son.”

  When Cass saw the bottle, and smelled it, the desire for drink made him tremble all over. He wanted to reach out and snatch the bottle away. But Bastard did not even reach for his gift. “It sure would make up, Mister S-Spokes,” he said, “them keys s-sure p-packed a wal-wallop.”

  Spokes’ face darkened, and he roared like a drunken bull at the boy.

  “Y’reck’n it would make up, eh? Well goddamn it—ye’ll play hell a-gittin’ it!”—and he crashed the bottle into a thousand fragments against the bars.

  After the officers had left, laughing and lurching down the stairs, Bastard said, “I knew he was just kiddin’ when he sh-shoved that t-tequila right out at me like that.”

  Cass tried to reach some of the liquor as it spilled down the floor, but neither his tongue nor his spoon was quite long enough.

  A single spoonful would have helped.

  For the next three days Mr Bastard’s attempt to complain to the commissioner and the consequent loss of his turnips was a running joke in the tank. Even Joe Spokes laughed the next few times he came up. “Any complaints t�
�day, anybody?” he would ask, looking at no one in particular; and the boys would giggle and repeat the joke among themselves for an hour after. Even Mr Bastard began to laugh at it a little. But the turnip-and-cabbage diet continued until the second day before the trials.

  On the second day before trials a grand jury came “to investigate conditions,” and on that day the boys got meat and milk and potatoes three times.

  “Any complaints to make, boys?” the foreman, a tall fellow who looked like a hill man, inquired.

  There was no complaint. Joe Spokes was standing in the run-around holding his key-ring in his right hand.

  Oh, the only friend that I have left

  Is Happy Sailor Jack;

  He tells me all the lies he knows

  An’ all the safes he’s cracked,

  He’s cracked them in Seattle,

  He’s robbed the Western Mail;

  It would freeze the blood of an honest boy

  In El Paso county jail.

  Cass thought, “Mebbe ol’ Nub ain’t such a bad hat after all. Ah guess mebbe he ain’t so tough as he takes on sometimes. Ah guess he wouldn’t jump no real white man less’n he got awful sore at him. He don’t never bother me. An’ he sure kin scrap all right wunst he gets his Irish up.”

  10

  DURING HIS LAST week in the El Paso County jail Cass lay for hours each day on his blanket, thinking of a different place. Eyes closed, he saw the great prairie once more. He saw a dark old house on Chihuahua Street, and a road where Mexican children had played. He saw a dusty doorway where once a lilac bloomed, and he seemed to smell the windy smell of clouds across the earth. He remembered how as a boy he had played in the sun in the summer; how wind had gone wailing through the white nights of winter; how dead leaves had drifted in the brown months of autumn; and how in one springtime all things had been troubling to him. He opened his eyes. The grayness of the ceiling four feet above his head came down like a weight upon his lids; that ceiling seemed part of a high dark wall, as a Bible’s covers once had seemed. A stench that a thousand imprisoned men had left hung in the air like a low gray pall.

  “Ah want to go home,” Cass thought to himself, forgetting that he had never really had a home. He was not so far from Great-Snake Mountain now, he kept telling himself; three counties to cross, that was not very far.

  All one night he lay wakeful, remembering, regretting, hoping. In a few days he would be free once more. Should he then return to the North? He thought of Chicago, of its million faces and its hostile doors, its frightened people and its hungry streets. He asked himself if Nancy wished to see him again as much as he wished to see her. He wondered, and could not tell. All that night he lay wakeful, with thoughts of Nancy and freedom. He thought that these last hours were, perhaps, the unclean fringe of his transient life—that when they were past life would, somehow, become secure. Somehow or other, he wouldn’t have to keep moving all the time now any more.

  Then it was morning, and it was April, and Joe Spokes sent up four breakfasts instead of six. When the boys saw that there were but four troughs they knew that two in the cell-block had been freed by the grand jury: on his last day in jail a man received no breakfast. So they all shouted at once through the bars at Spokes’ son, the second they saw the troughs.

  “Who’s the two gittin’ sprung, Junior? Am I? Is one me? Who’s out?”

  Junior referred to a slip of paper with which his father had furnished him. He held it upside-down for a minute, pretending to be unable to read; then he reversed it and tried to read the blank side. The boys waited humbly, till he had had his fill of teasing.

  “The troughs is one fo’ the guy you guys call Bastard an’ one fo’ Jew-Boy Legs,—he ain’t well enough to git out anyhow,—an’ one fo’ Raridon, ’cause he lies to Pa faster than a dog kin trot, an’ one fo’ thet godderned screw-me-down copper-belly cholo who Pa say he ain’t neper gonna leave go.”

  Nubby winked at Cass, and Cass returned the wink. But it was whole minutes before he fully realized that he was free . . .

  Sitting on the inside of the railing in a musty courtroom, Cass waited with Nubby to hear a judge tell them that they were free men. Cass saw Matches sitting on a bench on the other side of the room, with four other Negroes. Matches grinned, a fulsome, white, spontaneous grin, and waved one hand. Because Nubby was at his side, Cass feigned not to see. It had all been the dirty smoke’s fault that he’d been snatched in the first place.

  “Soon’s we git out,” Nubby said, “we’ll buy potatoes an’ onions an’ bread. Then we’ll jungle up in the scrub.”

  The judge resembled an old frog, for when he spoke he croaked.

  “This mo’nin’ yer lives is beginnin’ again, boys,” he informed them. “Find a job som’eres an’ stick hard to it. Work hard as yer able an’ you’ll both get ahead. Good-bye. Good luck. God bless yer.”

  He reached one hand down on them as they stood, and his eyes looked rheumy. The boys shifted their caps from their right to their left hands, and shook the old man’s fingers. Cass distrusted old men. It seemed to him that they always lied.

  They came out together onto a sunlit street. How strange it seemed to Cass to walk freely once more. How sweet it was just to breathe! He felt that they could not walk swiftly enough, could not breathe too deeply, and he began to run. Nubby tried hard to keep up beside him. They walked and ran until they reached that broad highway that leads away in a curve toward Presidio County.

  When they became too tired to walk farther, and it was growing gray dusk, they left the highway to cut across toward the Southern Pacific. They walked through tight-waisted Spanish dagger and cabbage-headed sotol cactus till they reached the tracks. In the low scrub there they built a fire. The prairie stars came out, and a small wind whispered by.

  Cass lay looking up into the night while Nubby poked potatoes about the coals. “Want to hear a song I made up once, Red?” Nubby asked. “It’s all about a tom-cat an’ a pussy-cat?” Cass said nothing, for he didn’t want the quietude of the night disturbed by Nubby’s wailing. But Nubby took his silence for consent.

  Cass felt that he wanted to sing something too, to shout out something in joy; and yet something hurt all the while. It was as though outwardly he rejoiced, yet inwardly still sorrowed, secretly, to himself. Nubby pointed at the sky. “Sure lots of stars up there t’night, ain’t they, Red?” “Yeah,” Cass agreed, gnawing a potato, “Ah oney hope ah kin stay out under ’em a spell now.”

  And an old wonder came over him, and an old fear.

  “Ah’m Cass McKay,” he told himself, “Ah bin in jail. Ah got kin-folk hereby, an’ mebbe ah’m goin’ home.”

  He fell to sleep thinking of his father.

  In the middle of the night he woke with fear like a hand at his heart. For a moment he thought he was back on his prison blanket; he sat bolt upright, sick and sweating. Fear held his heart for a full minute before he understood where he was. Then he saw a small light from a ranchhouse or barn shining to him from far in the distance, and he felt reassured. “Ah was in there a long time,” he told himself as though only now understanding, “but they’ve let me go now.” But the little light went out as he watched, and before he fell to sleep once more he felt afraid of something again; he did not know quite what.

  Shortly after daybreak he was aroused by Nubby. Nubby had sighted a jack-rabbit and was howling and zig-zagging crazily over the prairie after it, his right arm flapping in the wind and his left hurling clods. Cass joined in the chase. He hurled a jagged rock at two bounding ears, and then held his breath in fear that the rock might hit; but it missed by a foot, and the next moment the rabbit was gone. The boys returned to their jungle.

  “Whew!” Nubby gasped, “first one of them things I ever missed—but I did clam it once, I guess, right square in the back of the neck. He begun limpin’ a little after I thrun it, betcha she’ll think he’s been nibblin’ the sotol-cactus, he’ll seemed like to me. Say, when he gets back to his missus I’ll be
wobblin’ that bad.”

  About seven o’clock a green-fruit train came piling up the grade, and they hopped a coupling as the cars began gathering speed on the downslope.

  “Ah’m not trav’lin’ much further,” Cass shouted at Nubby over the din of the wheels, “cause ah got kin-folk this side o’ Great-Snake Mountain. Reck’n ah’ll stay on with ’em for a spell.”

  Nubby glanced at him with something of dismay. He had a genuine need of an able-bodied companion. An hour later, in an empty reefer, he showed money to Cass.

  “Forty-two bucks in that left boot, Red,” he said, counting in the cool dimness. “I guess I must of kangarooed twelve Mexes in that jailhouse before you ever bust in. Didn’t have much luck nohow after you come in. But now if you wants to go home to Maw-maw, like a pukey baby, go right ahead. I ain’t stoppin’ ya. But I’m goin’ to Chicago to get my tattooin’ vamped up. I know a place on Van Buren Street there. An’ we could have a real time in Chi too. I’d make a real man of you, Red, on this dough in Chi. Yeah, an’ when our money’s gone I know a place I could get us some more. That is, of course, if you just wanted to. I could learn you lots, Red. ’Course if you don’t want to know nothin’ I’ll just have to find some’ne elts to get tattooed with on Van Buren Street that’s all.” He offered Cass a ready-made cigarette; Cass took it before replying.

  “Ah’m plum sick o’ bummin’. Ah never wanted to in the first place, oney mah ol’ man got in bad in our town. Reckon that’s all blowed over now though, an’ ah got a sister ah ain’t even seen fo’ three years.”

  In Valentine the train stopped for an hour. Nubby bought bread and beans, and they ate on the outskirts of the city. When they were finished he gave Cass another ready-made cigarette, and they walked back to the train in silence.

  It was growing toward evening when they crossed the Presidio County line; the train began to slow toward the roundhouse.

  “Y’all better hop off with me here, Nub,” Cass suggested, rising. “They break this man up here. Be mebbe three-four hour fo’ there’ll be ’nother man out—’less there’s somethin’ on the Santy Fe befo’. Come on, Nub, ah’ll show yo’ mah home town.”