Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren

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      WHY STUB MCKAY turned out such a devil he himself hardly knew; he himself did not understand what thing had embittered him. He knew a dim feeling as of daily loss and daily defeat; of having, somehow, been tricked. A feeling of having been cheated—of having been cheated—that was it. He felt that he had been cheated with every breath he had ever drawn; but he did not know why, or by whom.

      The man was a strong man, yet his strength was a weakness. For someone kept cheating all the time, someone behind him or someone above. Somebody stronger than anyone else. And although he could never quite wind his fingers about his feeling, although he could never bring it out into light, yet he was as certain of it as he was of the blood in his veins. It was there just as palpably. It was there, at the bottom of all he thought, said and performed. At times the feeling was like an old hunger, sometimes like a half-healed wound in his breast. He was never without it.

      In time he gave his pain a secret name. To himself he named it: The Damned Feeling.

      Some of his fellow townsmen thought Stuart McKay half mad. In a border town, where even children drank and smoked, Stuart took pleasure in little but fighting and hymning. He used neither tobacco nor whiskey, he seldom swore, and he laughed almost never. Yet there seldom came a Saturday night that did not find him brawling, and he never missed a Sunday morning at the Church of Christ of the Campbellites. So he was hated, damned, and respected in Great-Snake Mountain as only a fearless man could be both damned and respected in that place.

      A lean and evil little devil Stubby was, all five feet and five inches of him, inflammable as sulfur and sour as citron, sullen as a sick steer and savage as a wolf. A moody, malevolent little man, with a close-cropped, flat-backed head of bristling red hair, and eyes so very pale, so very slit-like and narrow, that the blue of them was scarcely distinguishable from their small sooty whites; so dust-rimmed, narrow-wise and cold that they seemed nothing but brief blue glintings beneath the cropped red bristles.

      And although Stubby McKay was a good worker, yet because of his temper he seldom held any one job for a very long while. He was a section hand on the Southern Pacific a couple of months, he cleaned backhouses about the town for a time, then became a hostler’s helper on the Santa Fe. After that he got work as a night watchman in the town’s lumber yard, and that too he soon lost. Inevitably, in whatever capacity employed, high or low, he would be discharged for fighting. He would strike some yardman, or buffet a boilermaker, or insult a foreman. He was arrogant, insolent, and disrespectful toward his employers, and therefore earned very little when he did work. The townsfolk called him “catawampus,” meaning that they thought him violently cross-tempered. “Som’un ort to clean thet Stub McKay’s canyon up proper for him jest once,’ the folk agreed. “Mebbe thet’d learn him to be so derned catawampus all the time. The man’s that mean he ort to be muzzled.”

      No one ever succeeded in cleaning Stubby’s canyon for him, however. For all his brawling, he was never soundly beaten once. When hard-pressed he would draw a knife, pick up a brick or a bar of iron—anything within reach. Once, upon being chided for having employed a four-foot length of rubber hose to knock down a Mexican section boss, he explained himself half-apologetically:

      “Well, y’all see, when ah fight a man ah jest go all-to-pieces-like, so sometime it happen ah don’ rightly know exacly what is it ah got in mah hand. This Spik straw boss now, when he commence givun me all thet boss-man talk, ah gotten god-orful nervous-like an’ straighten up mah back to see does he mean it all—an’ ’en all o’ suddent there ah was, alarrupin’ his arse with thet ol’ rubber-hose line; an’ ah s’pose ah’m right fortunate it weren’t his haid ’stead of his arse, ’cause ah swear ah caint recall where ah picked up thet hose. Ah swear, ah jest caint recall.”

      And his favorite hymn, which he sang with clenched fists, was number thirty-six in Hymns of Glory:

       The son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain

       His blood-red banner streams afar—Who follows in his train?

       Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain?

      He lived with two sons and a daughter in a three-room shack in Mexican-town, and most of his neighbors were Mexicans. The shack faced a broad dust-road that led east to the roundhouse and west to the prairie: a road hung with gas lamps leaning askew above lean curs asleep in sun, where brown half-naked children played in ruts that many wheels had made. Within the home, poverty, bleak and blind, sat staring at four barren walls. Ragged dish towels hung, in a low festoon, from the damper of the stove-pipe to a nail above the sink, and the sink was a tin trough salvaged from a dump heap. Unwashed dishes and pans lay in it.

      Stuart’s living room was used for both dining and sleeping. In its center stood a table built solely of orange crates—a creation of Bryan McKay’s. It was unsteady, inclined to totter, as Bryan had been the morning he built it. A faded strip of green oilcloth covered it. A smoky and cheerless place, this room, with but one small window. On one wall hung the shack’s sole decoration, a dusty piece of red cardboard bearing the simple legend:

      CHRIST

      Is the head of this house

      THE UNSEEN HOST

      At every meal

      THE SILENT LISTENER

      To every conversation

      One room was a mere hole in the wall, a little sloping windowless cavern in which the sister Nancy slept, partitioned off from her men by a strip of dark cheesecloth nailed above the cavern’s opening.

      Slantwise behind the home ran the Santa Fe railroad; between the tracks and the house stood a lop-sided privy.

      The privy was loathsome within. It stank fulsomely. Scraps of torn paper lay strewn across its floor, flies swarmed in the place, no one had ever cleaned it. Its door hung creaking and half-unhinged, a thousand nameless dark weeds grew about it.

      The red dining-room legend one day found its way onto the privy wall. Stubby found it hanging lop-sidedly there, and came back into the house with one suspender unbuttoned. He laid the cardboard on the table, clutched a tuft of his close-cropped scalp with one paw, and rapped the legend fiercely with the knuckles of his other hand. Although he was very angry, yet his voice held a complaining ring that was like a plea beneath a threat.

      “Bry’n,” he said, “were you-all a well man today, ah swear ah’d beat yo’ fo’ this.”

      Bryan tittered slyly, girlishly, half to himself, and Stubby turned away. He could not bear to hear womanish giggling in a full-grown man. And Bryan would not admit that he had done the thing, although everyone knew that it could have been nobody else. Later on the younger brother asked Bryan if he were not just a little afraid of Christ Jesus.

      Bryan tilted forward on his chair in the corner till his shoeless feet found the bare dirt floor.

      “Not me, ah’m not afeered o’Jesus. Why, ah’m Jesus little wooly lamb, ah am. Me’n Jesus git along jest like this—” He crossed two fingers, one on top of the other, and thrust them under Cass’s nose. “See, young scapegallers—this is how me’n Christ Jesus git along. Oney