Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren
then you can’t tell for sure—till he cracks you over the side of the head with his pistol-butt. Then you’re fairly certain. He once hit a boy in the belly with his fist so hard that the boy died, in the grass by the tracks, half an hour after. A black boy. So look out for Greenville, it’s right above Boykin, and it’s Seth Healey’s town. Look out for Lima, too—that’s in Ohio. And look out for Springfield, the one in Missouri. Look out for Denver and Denver Jack Duncan. Look out for Tulsa, look out for Joplin. Look out for Chicago—look out for Fort Wayne—look out for St Paul, look out for Dallas—look out—look out—look out—LOOK OUT!
Most of the boys felt that they belonged. They were, definitely, underdogs. Between themselves and those above they drew a line for all to see. It was always “We” and “Them.” People who lived ample lives, who always stayed in one place, who always had a roof over their heads—these were “Them.” In judging a man, Cass learned, the larger question was not whether the man was black, white, or brown—it was whether he was a transient or “One of them ‘inside’ folks.” Inside of a house that was to imply.
Cass sensed the strong “we”-feeling among these men and boys. He learned that in jails where the food was inedible, as most often it was, the men bought their own food by levying upon each newcomer to the extent of whatever they could find on him. Kangaroo Court was held whenever a new vagrant was brought in, and assessment was always justified as being a fine imposed for breaking into jail without the consent of the inmates. Oldtimers always paid, if they could, and without hesitation; they understood the fine as a loose form of insurance. A man was assisting those of his own class, and when he himself was down his class would help him. But whether he was able to pay or not, he usually shared in the supplies bought outside the jail.
Kangaroo Court was an institution which pleased county judges and chief deputies, for it enabled them to pocket money which otherwise they might have been forced to spend on supplies. One jail in southern Louisiana had established a treasury with a fund of over two hundred dollars, so that the turnkey and sheriff were dined once a week by the prisoners. At the Grayson county jail in Sherman, Texas, the prisoners printed a weekly paper, The Crossbar Gazette.
All tales seemed strangely wonderful to Cass when he heard them told in the jungle. These men seldom spoke of the terrible hardships they endured. Hardship they most often bore in silence. It was of the infrequent and wholly accidental bits of good fortune they had happened upon of which they spoke: how one had found a new corduroy jacket with a wallet in the pocket when he had climbed down into a reefer one night in Carrizozo; how another had been taken into a Methodist minister’s home one time, and had been fed and clothed for three straight days; how another had come upon a drunken woman in an empty cattle car.
Of the pathetic effort to keep clean, merely to keep clean, they had nothing to say. They were always begrimed with coal dust and cinders, always begging soap from each other; and at every junction they sought water for washing so soon as thirst was quenched. They hung shirts to dry on fence-posts by the tracks or on bushes in the jungles; they put clothes on damp rather than dirty. Most carried combs, and pocket-mirrors and toothbrushes were not uncommon. Sometimes one would reveal a small fetish to Cass that he might not have shown a full-grown man: a woman’s glove or a woman’s handkerchief, found perhaps on a bench in a city park. One showed Cass a photograph of Mary Pickford and said, “Mary’s my aunt.”
Of the darker side Cass could not know, of this they did not speak. Of long cold nights when you walked unlit streets, hungry, ill, alone. When the wind cut so that you gasped with pain, and so tired you were you scarce could stand. When you knew you had either to beg or die; and the hate that is yellow and springs from shame rose within you and made numb your heart till you could think of nothing save how sweet it would be just to kill for the simple pleasure of killing. You felt how easing to your own hurt would be the sight of another man’s blood; you knew then that to vent your own pain you must see another man suffer too. Yes, a freezing marrow could be well warmed just by watching fresh blood flow—this, when you had not a penny for drink, made you forget fierce cold. The escape was called “jack-rolling.” Men fought then for the sheer sake of fighting. Two hungry men in an alley, at night, clasped in each other’s arms amid garbage and ashes, biting, kicking, sweating in terror—so that one could laugh in relief when the other lay senseless; so that one could look down and see dark blood bubbling above torn lips, and know that it was he who had brought the blood up in that throat, and that it was he who had torn those lips. But the men of the jungle never spoke of jack-rolling save in jest. Hunger had taught them silence as well as haste.
Oh I met a man the other day I never met before,
He asked me if I wished a job a-shovelin’ iron ore.
When I asked him how much he would pay, he said twelve cents a load,
I said, go ’long old feller—I’d ruther stay on the road.
“Ah’d like to get out of this pesthole,” Cass thought. “Ah’d like to see Fort Worth an’ Waco.”
Cass was fifteen in 1926. He was lank, like his brother Bryan, red-haired like his sister, and he was already somewhat cave-chested. When Cass walked, he slouched. When he stood stiff he sometimes cocked his head to one side, like a long-legged fighting cock, and then he looked as though he had not laughed four times in all his life. A gaunt and lugubrious lout. He had gone to school long enough to learn how to read and write, but then the school board had hired a teacher who was half-Mexican, and Stub had taken Cass out in protest. The teacher was still in the school, so Cass had never returned.
Cass could feel his body growing, it was groaning and strainng and stretching. There was a great travail within him, a great toiling and laboring, as though an oak were sprouting in his vitals.
Sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, and then he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing at all.
In his mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky—a common bush would become a glory, a careless sparrow on a swinging bough a wonder to behold; and then the light would fade and fade, like a slow gray curtain dropping.
Some moments were irretrievable.
One day in March he raised his eyes from play and saw a solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue; and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that time Cass looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.
In a sense it had vanished.
At times he could catch Nancy in one of these strange life-glimpses. One second she would be moving about the kitchen, his sister about her familiar tasks, and the next she would be a total stranger, doing he knew not what. There would be a picture of her in his mind then—not moving, but rigid, tensed with life and still as death. He would be afraid and bewildered.
And then there was the lilac—that spring-time when it bloomed. It grew by day against a fence, and it bloomed at night, in rain. Cass waited each day for its blooming; each night he smelled it from where he slept. Every morning he brushed its buds of soot that trains had left in the night; each day he watered it. He had watched it every day, and he had seen:
That it grew out of dust and yearned toward sky; that it seemed half-asleep in the early morning, but that it became restless as day grew toward night; that when east-wind passed it shuddered in joy as though unseen hands were stroking its buds; and that whenever the sun was directly overhead the whole plant, even to its tiniest twigs, seemed bending a little in pain.
And one night Cass awoke, and heard a small rain on the dooryard dust, and he smelled a velvet-dark smell. It came to him on the smell of rain, and he heard the tapping of drops on the roof overhead. Behind a thin curtain he heard his sister’s low breathing; and knew she slept with her hair for a pillow.
Then the velvet smell made a purple image in his brain; his throat seemed to swell with the wild-dark odor. In the yard dust caught between his toes and the light rain flecked his face. Above his head night-clouds hung, heavily brooding. And the smell from the