Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren
you, son?”
Cass wasn’t very certain; but someone in back barked at the sergeant: “No—and he couldn’t get a bullet up his arse in Nicaragua if he stayed at home, neither.”
A few of the bums laughed, but the sergeant seemed only annoyed. “Well, he’ll never lose a leg under a freight train by joinin’ the infantry, wise-guy back there,” and he turned again to Cass. “Don’t never listen to wise-guys, son. They’ll poison your mind against your own country. An’ I’ll bet you’re straight from the Big Bend country, aren’t you, son?” He asked this last with a friendly white smile, and placed one friendly hand on Cass’s shoulder. Cass drew back from that hand; he remembered his father’s hand, on his brother’s shoulder.
And he looked down, and he saw that this man wore pointed boots.
“Ah guess ah don’t want to join no army today, mister,” he said.
The sergeant put one gloved finger under Cass’s chin, and lifted Cass’s face to his own. “Why not? You have no physical defect, have you? You haven’t got anyone dependent on you, have you, son?”
Cass stared, he didn’t know what all those lawng words meant.
“You haven’t . . .”
The man in the back iet out a warning whoop—“Don’t listen to that army-pander, kid—Uncle Sam is a old he-whore and that guy is his youngest pimp.”
A few laughed faintly, moving up an inch. The sergeant blinked and feigned not to hear. “Have you any physical defect, son?” he persisted quietly.
“Yeah, ah reck’n,” Cass said.
The sergeant frowned, spat fiercely toward earth to conceal a self-doubt, hesitated a second and passed on down the line, surveying prospects. Cass heaved a long sigh of relief. To the man in front of him he whispered, “Is that some gen-rel? Do he git paid much?”
“Five dollars for every kid he recruits, that’s all he gets.”
Cass drew in breath in amazement. “Gawsh a-mighty,” he gasped. Then he thought, “Why, hell—that old feller was a-doin’ the same thing ah used to do fo’ Pepita back home. Oney ah didn’t get no five bucks apiece, ah just got a sack o’ terbacco or a Mex nickel.”
When he got inside the doors something within his stomach’s pit took a cold little slippery flop, nauseating him momentarily—each man in the line ahead, he saw, was writing his name in a book before receiving food. Fear strove with hunger then. He became afraid that he might not remember how to write his name, for it had been long since he had learned how. But he was shoved ahead by those behind until it was his turn. Then he thought wildly, “Ah’ll make a stab—ah’ll just bluff the whole bunch—mebbe ah’ll be able to do it agen if ah do it suddent-like.” He picked up the pencil, felt eyes on him, made a long swift scribble and grabbed for a plate. Although no one seemed to see, it was not until he was safely seated at the rough board table in the dining room that he again drew easy breath. On his plate was a square of cornbread afloat in black molasses.
The smell of unclean bodies mingled in the heavy air with the smell of beans boiling in the kitchen. All about him men were eating, and the doors and walls were smeared with mud and scraps of food. One place at the bench whereon he sat was vacant because someone had vomited there, in an orange-ed puddle.
Cass watched those about him as he ate, wondering about each of them. Most were boys. One or two gray-beards, but only one or two. Not half a dozen out of thirty, all told, who even approached middle age. Three Mexican boys, sitting at a separate table; eight Negroes, ranging from twelve years to twenty, on a bench equally segregated; and the rest sitting at the table where he sat, with faces American and much like his own. High-cheek-boned, thin-lipped, blue-eyed faces. Several he thought younger than himself.
One had a face as fruity as a cherub’s, a rosy, soft and smiling face that had not yet lost the rounded contours of its infancy. When the counterman asked this boy his name, the lad replied swiftly, “I’m Thomas Clay; I’m thirteen-and-a-half-goin’-on-fourteen—gimme an extra lot o’beans an’ two cups o’ misery an’ I’ll tell you some more.”
A little stout man with a huge breadth of chest and shoulders and a small bent nose in a perfectly circular face appeared in the doorway and roared jovially at everyone:
“Directly yo’ all finish eatin’, couple you boys step out heah an’ give me a han’ with a bit of kindlin’—takes kindlin’ to cook yo’ all cawnbread yo’ know.”
He said this so smilingly, so pleasantly, that three who had already finished rose immediately to help him. Then the others were set to cleaning dishes and making up the wooden bunks on the second floor. Cass wanted to bathe, he was caked with coal-dust; but he saw no sign of a shower or a tub and he lacked the courage to ask. With a dozen other American boys, each with a pan and a bucket, he was set to sorting raw beans; letting these trickle through their fingers, a handful at a time, the boys picked out small stones and foreign matter.
Cass found himself working beside the lad of the cherubic aspect. In an undertone the boy confided to Cass that the information he had given the counterman was false; his real name, he said, was not Thomas Clay but Thomas Clancy, his true age not twelve but sixteen, and the time he had spent on the road nearer four years than four months.
He had run away from a reform school in Cleveland, he added, when he was twelve, and had been on the road ever since that time. Cass did not know which tale was true and did not greatly care.
The long afternoon wore on; as soon as one sack was picked through the counterman brought out another, and Cass’s eyes began to burn with the strain of keeping them fastened on his palms in the darkness of the place. There were no lights, the place was damp as a tomb. The counterman told them that when night came they would have to double up on bunks upstairs.
Shortly before dark—Cass was again feeling hungry—the friendly fellow of the forenoon came in. He stood in the doorway as he had done in the morning, shutting out the gray October light with shoulders so square that he gave the impression of wearing a two-by-four plank under his coat. For a minute he said nothing. Then he planted his feet wide beneath him, and drunkenness pumped out in his voice. And he spoke hard—hard as a fighting man might speak, after a hard defeat.
“Git to thet woodpile now, ye tramps, ye goddamned pesky go-about bastards—y’all been eatin’ an’ crappin’ roun’ heah sence mo’nin’ now—git t’ thet woodpile o’ git yo’ arse in the in-fun-tree, one o’ the other.”
His right hand kept jerking over his shoulder to the lumber yard.
“Woodpile o’ in-fun-tree, one o’ the other.”
He repeated this several times, then cursed them all once more and abruptly walked away. The counterman began to laugh; but even as he did so he checked himself, for, surprisingly enough, the little man had returned.
“Git in th’ army o’ elts git t’ thet woodpile, ah says—tha’s what ah says. Shet down th’ goddamned charity-suckin’, bumfeedin’ bean’ry racket—that’s what ah been tellin’ ’em all. Put the sonsabitches in th’ army or put th’ sonsabitches to work—tha’s the idee—sweat the bastards’ balls off—teach th’ pesky go-abouts to keep out o’ Texas—tha’s what ah tells ’em all, uptown.”
He cast a challenging eye about the room, saw no one uncowed, and left once more. This time he did not return, and the counterman finished his laugh, albeit somewhat sheepishly now. None of the men at the tables joined with him; somehow, absurd as the little man had sounded, not one felt like laughing. All sat silent at their idiot’s task, letting the little brown kidney-shaped beans run through their fingers, looking morosely down at their palms. Such a ring of authority had there been in that drunken voice that it had left every man and boy of them inwardly agitated. The words had sounded too much like an alternative offered by one perfectly sober. It had left them troubled, resentful, and fearful of they scarcely knew what. It had made each man too sharply aware that he was an outcast—an