Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren
into the doorway. Bryan scooped the cat up and whirled him about like a flywheel, first this way and then that, while his mouth fixed into a hard and crooked grin.
Cass pleaded hoarsely, “Bry’n! Yore hurtin’ him”—then the body, claws still outspread, whanged like a small pillow against the wall above the stove, and the head remained in the hand. Bryan flung this at Cass, and the sun from the doorway was in Cass’s eyes. Fur brushed his shoulder and dampened his cheek. He screamed in fright, in hoarse terror, and in hate. He stared at a ragged head on the door at his feet, saw dark blood seeping into dust there, and touched his cheek with his finger. He stood looking down for minutes after Bryan had left, hand on cheek touching blood. Then, slowly, his hate drowned his fear.
He ran up the road after Bryan, and pounded Bryan’s back with both fists till Bryan whirled and caught him. He held Cass fast, with no drunken fingers, white dark-shawled women paused as they passed and Mexican children gathered to see. For one terrible second Cass thought Bryan was going to twist his head off as he had the cat’s.
“Combate! Combate!” sang the little brown children, leaping and skipping in the sun.
Bryan did not strike. He stood looking down and holding Cass tightly, with all the drunkenness gone out of his fingers. Yet when he spoke Cass thought him still drunk, for what Bryan said made simply no sense at all. Although Cass was squirming and writhing and twisting, yet he heard each word clearly.
“Nothin’ but lies—nobody told nothin’ but Jesus-killin’ lies. Told us it was to fight fo’ this pesthole—told me . . . Oh, ah didn’t believe all they told, none of us did, but we laughed an’ went anyhow. Now, look at me. An’ they won’t never speak truth to you-all neither.”
He released Cass as suddenly as he had seized him and went on his way toward the town, walking slow.
Mexican children trailed Cass all the way toward the house, mocking and inquisitive. “What goin’ on, red-son-of-beetch—eh? What trouble you sons-of-beetch make t’day?”
Back in the kitchen Cass made a coffin out of his shoeshine box and buried the tom within the lilac’s shadow.
Toward the end of that afternoon he was in the living room watching a hawk wheeling in dusk far over the prairie as the prairie night came down. He saw night come walking between the little low houses, down through the winding Mexican alleys. Wind came, bearing sand between houses and trees. He saw sand on the broad road rise, in whirling night-spires, to spread over the roof tops. For a long hour he watched the approaching storm, till all was utterly dark. Wind struck against wall then, whispered something quickly, and passed on, driving all small things before it.
Cass wondered if he would ever have to be outside, to be driven before darkness as a small thing before wind.
DURING THE RAINY months of winter, after the wagon-wheels of autumn had left long knolls and low ridges far over the prairie, when rooftops were sometimes white of a morning, then talk of a coal train coming through would spread like wildfire in the town. Some would say it was coming on the Southern Pacific; others would have it straight from the station-master himself that it was due on the Santa Fe: and this made a difference, for the trains took water at different points. Usually the majority of those who sought the coal were driven off by brakemen or detectives before they secured so much as a single lump, but there were times when a coal train did come through and neither brakeman nor bull came near. These times were rare in Great-Snake Mountain, and they were remembered for long weeks after as a holiday is remembered.
One morning in February of 1927, there came the usual afternoon whisper—two coal cars were coming through on the Santa Fe at three o’clock! Clark Casner, the ticket agent, had just let the cat out of the bag. There wouldn’t be so much as one bull riding, Clark had said. The train would stop fifteen minutes for water, and the coal cars would be toward the tender. Fifteen minutes! No bulls! Could such a thing be? Then someone, of course, had to refute it—the car, this one said (and he too had it straight), would come through on the S. P. about four in the morning—“An’ when it do y’all best be in yo’ baids, ’cause thet man ain’t gonna stop fo’ fifteen secon’s—ain’t gonna stop ay-tall—he’s gonna come thoo heah shoutin’ lak th’ manifest t’ Waco.” Rumor and conflicting rumor rose then and strove, and only the actual arrival of the train on the Santa Fe put an end to argument.
Cass and Johnny Portugal, a halfbreed boy who lived near the roundhouse, went down to the tracks together that afternoon with a gunny-sack between them. It took two boys, working swiftly together, to fill such a sack.
They found a dozen children huddled on the pumping station with chapped blue lips. All carried gunny-sacks, and one held a clothes-pole besides. This man was Luther Gulliday, the McKays’ next-door neighbor. The clothes-pole had a purpose.
Beside Luther Gulliday stood a little Mexican girl in a long black shawl, clutching behind her the handle of a wobble-wheeled doll buggy. In the bottom of this carriage Cass observed a carnival kewpie doll that had no head lying sprawled on its back with arms outspread.
It looked somehow odd to see such a doll, so helpless and headless in cold and wind.
The girl surveyed Cass and Johnny with an Indian antagonism in her eyes. When Johnny greeted her familiarly, in Spanish, she did not reply. Merely stood waiting in mute hostility there, bare baby-knuckles clutching a doll buggy’s handle.
“She’s half Osage,” Johnny whispered. “Her folks come down from Pawhuska last week.”
“Osage or Little Comanche,” Cass replied, “she won’t git enough coal fo’ two nights in that contraption.”
Cass wondered what the child would do if he stepped over and lifted the doll out of the carriage as though he intended to take it from her. Then he looked at her, out of one eye’s corner, and concluded immediately that she would do plenty. No one was getting very far ahead of this girl on this trip, that was plain enough to be seen.
“She don’t have to look so fix-eyed at everyone,” he thought. “If that man really comes through like they say, there’ll be a-plenty fo’ all us. Why, ah cu’d fill that dinky buggy out o’ this heah sack an’ hardly miss me a lump. How perty she look tho’—My!”
Cass had never, heretofore, seen such beauty in a child.
And when the train came toiling painfully around the base of the mountain three miles distant, Cass saw her step back just an inch. He saw that she was already afraid. Then the cars were lumbering past, someone cried, “Carbón! Carbón!”—and the first of the coal cars was going by. Rolling slow.
What a bustling about there was now! Nobody stomped cold feet or swung his arms now. Nobody stood slapping his palms together just because a couple of thumbs were cold—there was something better to do with cold fingers now. Cass and Johnny Portugal were among the first to get into the coal car, but a dozen others followed, like so many buccaneers swarming over the sides. Johnny held the sack while Cass filled it; they filled it between them, right there and then, laughing and swearing all the while. Everyone laughed and swore, working frantically.
Only Luther Gulliday worked slowly.
Luther Gulliday loved order and system in his work. He too climbed into the car, but he did not, like the others, begin an unmethodical hurling of coal into a sack or over the side of the car. Luther did all things differently from other men. He went about now picking out the largest lumps he could lay hands on, placing them carefully, one by one, along the iron shelf that runs the length of a car on the outside above the wheels, all the while counting: “One! Two! Three!”—until the iron shelf was lined to its full length. Then he hopped down, held the pole like a lance against the first lump and stood stiff as a statue, his gunny-sack open and waiting. Should anyone have presumed to take one of his lumps before the car began moving, Luther would have cracked him smartly with the pole. And as the car started rolling again the lumps fell neatly, one by