Читать книгу Somebody in Boots - Nelson Algren - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWHY 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 the one on the bottom, that’s me every time, an’ him on the top—that’s Christ Jesus.” Then he tittered girlishly, and crossed and recrossed his fingers.
Cass was a sickly thing, and Bryan had left his health in France. But Nancy was strong, her girlhood was happy, she had always been gay.
As a small girl, walking alone in the tiny garden on the mornings of those early days, days as yet undarkened by any shadow, she would laugh at everything she saw, red zinnias and blue morning-glories, tall dahlias and the wild daisy. Of the sweet purple clover she wove herself garlands, she made herself crowns of lilac and rose. Then, dressed like some little brown Mexican flower-girl, anklets of marigold, wristlets of grass, she would dance through the garden singing in sunlight, till she frightened the sparrows and caused them to scold her. For sheer delight she would dance, laughing, leaping and twirling, whirling about with her brown arms stretched wide; then, laughing and gasping, half-dizzied and toppling, she would throw herself down in the long grass of summer; laughing, laughing, weeping with laughter.
In all bright things she took deep joy: in gay-colored birds, in pictures and ribands; in gaudy new dresses, in flowers and songs.
Nance had been mischievous, too, as a child, always fighting with street urchins, chasing the chickens, or stealing white grapes off honest folks’ vines.
All day one day she coveted a great white blossom growing in the yard of neighbor Luther Gulliday. It was a wild chrysanthemum, she had not seen one before in her life; so she begged Luther for it, and he gave her instead—an apple. Nance went off quite humbly—an excellent actress. But when dark came she strolled again toward her flower, saw no one watching, plucked it and ran.
So all her days passed, unreckoned, fast-fleeting. She plucked wild plums, in the sunlight she found them, and her days were like these: she grew in light, unattended.
Sometimes after supper, while undressing for bed, she would press her hands slowly down the white bow of her loins. A great wonder would fill her, she would stand looking down. She would lie still in the darkness, her breasts like twin spears; and she would feel then as though she lay on a pyre whose flames were already beginning beneath her. The girl would be afraid, though she did not know of what. And her face in the dark would change to that of a woman.
Then she would sleep, and in sleep too she laughed. She was three years older than the boy Cass.
So the house stood, and so were the McKays, in the pre–depression years, on the West Texas prairie. Their home stood like a casual box on the border; it was wooden and half-accidental. It had no roots in the soil, it stood without permanence. Although it was old and unpainted and rotting, yet it appeared somehow to have been in its place for but the past few days. So with the people within—Texan-American descendants of pioneer woodsmen—they too had no roots. They too were become half-accidental. Unclaimed now they lived, the years of conquest long past, no longer accessory to hill and plain, no longer possessing place in the world.
They too were rotting.
On the edge of the town grew the jungle. Fathers warned sons not to go near it. Mothers intimidated their six-year-olds with tales of bearded men lying in wait in the long grass down by the Santa Fe tracks. But to a boy like Cass McKay, who was a lonely child, the Santa Fe jungle was not a fearful place. To a boy like Cass, who feared his father and had no mother, the jungle offered companionship.
Boys little older than himself lay idling about in long sun-shadows there, talking, jesting, eating, sleeping, waiting for one train or another. They boiled black coffee in open tins or ate beans with a stick; they rolled cigarettes single-handed and sang songs about far-away places. Cass never listened without wonder, he never watched without admiration.
“Ah’d like to git out of this pesthole some day,” he mused to himself. “Ah’d go to Laredo or Dallas or Tucson—anywhere ah’d take fancy to go. Ah’d git mah right arm tattooed in New Awlins, ah’d ship out f’om Houston or p’raps f’om Port Arthur; ah’d git to know all the tough spots as well as the easy ones. Ah’d always know jest where to go next. Ah’d always be laughin’ an’ larkin’ with folks.”
Cass listened to the boys and older men, and he learned many things:
That Beaumont was tough, but was loosening up. That Greensboro (in the place called Car-line)—that that was a right bad little town to ride into. That Boykin, right below it, was even worse. That toughest of all was any place that was anywhere in Georgia; if you were caught riding there you were put on a gang, and you worked on a pea farm from sunrise till sunset, sweating along in a chain for sixty-one days or until they caught someone else to take your place. But they gave you fifteen cents every week, and a plug of tobacco on Sundays besides. “So that part’s not so bad,” Cass thought.
He was a red-headed shaver in blue overalls and bare feet.
“Stay ’way from Waycross,” an old Wobbly warned him, “less you want to do ninety days in a turp camp.” And a young man sang an old tune for the boy, beating on a tin can in time with his song.
Turp camp down in Gawgia,
Cracker on a stump,
Big bull-whip he carries makes them blizzard-dodgers hump.
Watch ’em flag it out of Gawgia when they’ve done their little bump.
Oh boom the little saxophone, rap the little drums;
We’ll sing a little ditty till the old freight comes.
Southern Texas, but for Beaumont and Sierra Bianca, was simple; the Rio Grande valley was a downright cinch—you could ride blind down there without any penalty just so long as you got off on the side away from the depot when you got into McAllen. You could get through Alabama all right—provided you didn’t stand up on the tops like a tourist, so long as you stayed out of sight at division points, provided you stayed off the A. & W.P. Those A. & W.P. bastards utterly discouraged a man, for they made a point of putting you off at a spot in the woods forty-four miles northeast of Montgomery—a water-tank in the wilderness entitled Chehawee. And you walked to Montgomery then unless you had a fin. You could stay on for a fin, cash down on the barrelhead.
Look out for that town in Mississippi called Flomaton, ’cause that’s Mick Binga’s hole. Binga, even when he had both arms, was plenty-plenty tough. One night he licked two niggers for riding and they came back an hour after and shoved him under the wheels so that he lost his right wing—but he shot and killed both niggers while they were running away. Since then he’s a devil on whites, and death to blacks. Since then he’s killed and crippled so many niggers that even his railroad has lost count. Some say he’s killed twenty. Some say more, some less. Some say that when he gets fifty even he’s going to quit to give his boy the job. His boy is majoring in French philosophy now at Tulane, but everyone knows how well such stuff will pay him.
The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight;
On their backs in no clothes, in their pockets no bills,
Each day they keep coming from the dreary black hills.
Look out for Marsh City—that’s Lame Hank Pugh’s. Look out for Greenville—that’s old Seth Healey’s. He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hose-length in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any back-fightin’ when it comes down—sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.
Old Seth Healey at Greenville—there’s a real bastard for you. Someone ought to kill that old man one of these days. The only way you can tell he’s a bull as welt as a brakie is by his hat. He wears patched blue overalls and keeps his star hid. Lean as Job’s turkey and twice as mean. The hat’s a big floppy affair with three holes in the top, and it’s the only way you can tell that the fellow coming down the tracks is Healey. Sometimes he’s bareheaded, 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 dooryard’s corner drew him as powerfully as though a woman waited him there: he traced the texture of lilac leaves as though touching a young girl’s breasts for the first time. He closed his eyes; his fingers wandered wantonly, to stroke that delicate blooming.
The lilac was blooming in the night.
Cass buried his face deep in lilac-leaf that time, and his heart pained, first trembling a little, then swelling slow.
That was in the springtime when the lilac bloomed, but it never bloomed for him again.
Often in the evenings of that spring and summer he would become uneasy and restless; he would begin to walk because, of a sudden, it would seem hard to stand still. His spindling shanks would start clipping along like a great pair of shears, ever faster and faster, till the walk became a run and the run became a race—then something would give within, and he would be tired, tired. He would return slowly, feeling troubled and strangely dissatisfied. Utterly exhausted, he would climb into bed with his brother.
Then such dreams as he would have! Once he was atop the utmost peak of the highest mountain on earth, clouds and storm winds breaking about him, snow-gales sweeping down. He was naked, and he was laughing—he was not cold among these snows. And everything was so wild and strong that when he woke in the morning he was sickened by the sights and sounds and smells of the house: the stains of Stubby’s spittle and Bryan’s cut-plug tobacco juice dried in brown globs against the wall; the sweaty, yellowish smell of unclean bedclothes beneath him, and the sour smells from the kitchen. The work-a-day world was a sorry place compared to what Cass knew in dreams.
Yet once he dreamed he was walking softly down a dark and narrow way where little blue lights burned all in a row. Black-cowled children stood in darkened doorways as he passed, and he walked ever softer and softer, for everything about this street seemed strange. Then all the little blue lights went out at once, there was no light anywhere in the world, and he woke. And that time it was good to see the work-a-day world once more; Cass felt, somehow, that on that night he had come close to death.
He did not always dream. Sometimes he lay awake beside his sleeping brother, wondering, filled with an adolescent yearning, imagining all manner of far-away places. He saw broad blue waters and woody places, pleasant cities where children played. Sometimes as he lay so Nancy would laugh lowly out of sleep, and he would be recalled from wonder. Then he would think of his father, how Stuart rode switch engines all through the mysterious night. He would think of his father, how, in the chill, smoky mornings, he would come in while Cass was dressing by the wood stove, tracking soot and cinders and sand into the kitchen on his pointed little brown Spanish boots, dangling an empty tin dinner pail from his hand.
In after years Cass never heard the long thunder of passenger cars over a bridge in the dark, but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door; never saw the white steam whistle in the light, but he saw his lather stretched, mouth agape, on the disarranged cot in the corner, brown boot-toes pointing upward.
And in after years Cass always feared a night of storm or wind. On such nights, as a boy, he heard something, or someone, come stealing through darkness out on the road; he heard cold fingers tap along the west wall, wind-fingers trying the knob, then, whispering something quickly, something running like the wind in haste away, driving all small things before it.
Yellow and black, yellow and black: these came, for Cass, before he was grown, to be the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death. To think of living was to see yellow; to see blood was to think of black. He could never in all his life see blood as crimson—it looked too dark for that. When Cass thought of blood he saw a black rivulet running a rail that gleamed in sunlight—an iron rail gleaming yellowly, as though smiling while it drank.
This was because of a thing which occurred when Cass was not quite sixteen.
All one bright windy morning he had worked in the dooryard. (Stuart had forbidden him to run with Mexican boys.) He had built himself a tire-swing; he had turned a clothes-wringer for Nancy for an hour, and had helped her hang out the washing; he had carried in kindling; he had patched a frayed kite.
And all about him, on the roofs of the houses, aslant the old privy, across the small garden, through air, earth and water—over all things streamed the strong yellow sunlight. As though coming like rain from atop Great-Snake Mountain, the deep yellow sunlight. The good yellow sunlight; and the mad March wind.
He had heard the whistle of the noon freight on the Southern Pacific to Houston—three long and two short blasts—and swiftly, as a thing done every day, he hopped down from his tire-swing and raced toward the S. P. tracks. Even though this train would not be hauling coal, as he knew it would not be, yet it remained a duty to watch it pass. To see the ’boes that would be riding the tank cars, to exchange hand-waves with them, to share the excitement that all there would feel—this would be the event of Cass McKay’s day.
He was almost too late. The engine itself was a quarter of a mile east of town when he arrived, and he was only in time to see the last half-dozen gondolas roll by; she was fast picking up speed, and the brakeman was already back in the cab. Two Mexican section hands and several town boys were standing about a thing atop the cinder embankment. A thing huddled. Yes indeed, it wasn’t often that one could come into town without seeing a sight or two for one’s pains. Eagerly Cass clambered up, small stones slipping beneath his bare feet, stepping over the sagebrush that grew up through the cinders: then he pressed himself roughly between the two Mexicans and saw what they saw.
Face downward in the sand beside a clump of thistle a boy was lying, his right arm flung across his eyes, a boy in a brown shirt and blue corduroy slacks.
Over him a tall man stood looking down as though understanding this all to himself.
The left arm was spewed off slantwise at the shoulder, the jaw hung limp. This Cass saw first. One eye hung out of its socket by one long thin wet thread, the filament rising and falling a little straight up and down as it hung. Someone had pitched a small bundle of clothes to one side and strewn it over with sand.
At the waist, between the dark shirt and a broad bright belt, the side began to tuck in and out in short quick violent little jerks. In—out. One of the Mexicans called shrilly. “Look! Look! See what he do now! In and out he going!” Two of the town boys walked toward the bundle and went off down the tracts with it dangling between them.
And all down the gleaming yellow rail there ran the warm wet blood—warm wet blood running black and slow beneath the unpitying sun; black and slow down an iron rail, darkening small stones as it spilled and seeped, into ties; the blood of heart and brain and sinew wetting a thistle in the sand. And black, black, black; black as darkness on the bright sun’s face.
The thunder of the morning freight faded to a low singing of rails through heat, to die at last in the east into silence.
There never came, in later years, a sunny, windy day in March, but Cass would feel the heart within him pumping, pumping momently; and he would be faintly sickened and half uneasy and somewhat afraid.
Yellow and black, yellow and black—these were the colors of sun and blood, the hue of life and the shade of death, the symbol of flesh and the sign of dust.
In August of 1926 Cass saw blood again. Bryan killed an old housecat that had been around the home for seven years; and he killed the creature by wrenching off its head.
Bryan McKay was easy-natured enough when sober; yet when drunk he could be as cruel as malice itself. One day he noticed the old cat chase one of the hens off the porch, but he paid little attention and went on his way. He knew the old tom never killed anything, not even mice. But three days later, drinking tequila in the town with friends, he remembered, and put his bottle down.
Cass was in the kitchen that morning, painting a shoeshine box for use in town. The old tom was curled on a chair beside the sink, pulsing evenly, after the manner of most good cats. Cass heard Bryan’s voice approaching, and he put his brush aside.
“Chicken-chasin’! Bird-killin’! Sly black egg-suckin’ son-a bitch . . .”
Cass grabbed a newspaper off the stove and threw it over the cat as it slept. Had he not done so Bryan might never have caught him. At Cass’s touch the tom vaulted to the floor and raced directly into Bryan’s hands as Bryan lurched 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.
