Читать книгу Somebody in Boots - Nelson Algren - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCASS RODE ATOP a boxcar, watching the Texas hills roll by. “Leavin’ them hills now,” he kept telling himself, “lieavin’ ’em fo’ good an’ all—leavin’ paw an’ po’ Bry’n an’ sister.” And when he thought of Nancy his heart pained. But he was going to San Anton’ now, that big city where the army lived, and he wasn’t coming back. He was headin’ from San Anton’ to New Awlins, ’cause that was even bigger than Houston. Oh, he’d go everywhere now, everywhere he’d always wanted to go—Jacksonville, Shreveport, Montgomery and Baton Rouge. He’d see all the strange places he’d always wanted to see. He’d get tattooed like a sailor, all over his chest and arms.
As the train gathered speed and the night wore on the cold began to reach him; he climbed down into a gondola loaded with iron rails, seeking warmth there.
From sleep he woke with a sudden start, a warning heard in the jungle many months before ringing in his brain: “The wheels slipped on the track an’ two rails jolted loose an’ damn ef one didn’ go clearn through that Po’ boy’s belly . . .”
He climbed once more atop the boxcar, but his body had cooled from his brief nap and he could not bear the biting cold. Carefully then he worked along the spine of the cars, afraid to stand upright because of the wind. When he reached a box with a loose hatchway he crawled inside. It was an empty cattle car, the door was covered with straw. Cass heaped several dusty armfuls in a corner and fell to sleep with a wadded yellow newspaper under his head for a pillow. He was very tired.
When he awoke it was morning, and slant light was flashing past into the gaps between the car’s boarding. The train was approaching the yards in San Antonio, and he climbed out as it began to slow down.
Cass was gladdened and surprised to see a full twenty more ’boes come off with him, from several parts of the long van, and he fell in with them as they walked. All seemed headed for the same destination. Down the track a hundred yards they came to a frame house resembling a stable. Near the place, hunkered over wood fires, a dozen-odd men with empty faces waited. Cass paused before a sign on a fence, and spelled out a warning there; his lips moved as he read:
FREE SOUP KITCHEN AND CITY SHELTER—STAY OUT OF TOWN AND KEEP OFF ALL TRAINS NOT IN MOTION
He was suddenly aware that he was ravenously hungry.
As he was standing in line someone tapped his shoulder gently; he turned his head, and such a man as he had never before seen in all his life stood before him. A tall man in khaki, in glistening black boots, with badges and buttons, with red stripes and gold braid. And this apparition was speaking to him, Cass McKay.
“Boy, don’t you know you’re wasting your life?” it asked.
Cass cocked his head; he hadn’t known. He wanted to reach out one finger, to touch that bright braid.
“Riding the rods I mean—that’s wasting your life, ain’t it? The army makes men out of green kids like you.”
Cass grinned a half-grin with one side of his face. His nose was running, so he licked up with his tongue.
“The government wants men to send to China, the Philippine Islands, Cuba, Haiti—you couldn’t ever get to Haiti by riding the rods, now could 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 outcast sorting pebbles out of small brown beans on the sufferance of society, an outcast whose next job might be that of shooting down outcasts in other lands—on the sufferance of society. The feeling was not good.
An hour before midnight the man to Houston whistled past. Cass and Thomas Clay crouched under an embankment until the engine passed, and Cass ventured the guess that there would be but few empties in the string, judging by the engine’s hard straining. They could not find even a cattle-car unclosed; everything rolling was sealed. Cass became a bit afraid that the entire string would go by and leave them behind for another ten-hour wait; but Clay insisted on an empty, and Cass wanted companionship. Clay could not be hurried. “I’m kind of pooped out t’night,” he complained. “You kin grab anythin’ you feel like grabbin’, but me, I want an empty so’s I can sleep. These S. P. reefers feel like you’re settin’ ’top a wobbly waffle iron—Jeez, they make dents in my fanny so’s I can’t walk straight all next day.” An empty ore car came rolling by. Since the cab itself was but six cars behind this, Clay had to consent to hopping it. He went up first, and Cass ran with the car till Clay was on the last rung of the ladder before he himself hopped.
Clay clung to the side, peering down into the darkness. He would not jump till he could see into what he was jumping. He saw that the car was unloaded, that its sides sloped steeply to the center, and that there two chutes gaped wide. Beneath the chutes he caught the glint of rolling wheels; and he turned his head to say that they would have to find another car.
Cass was already coming up—when he reached the top he leaped past Clay, with a victor’s shout, and flung himself over the side onto the slant steel floor. Clay swung over swiftly, saw a white hand sliding downward in darkness, and mashed his shoe down on its knuckles. He felt Cass fumbling at his heel, felt him clutch his leg—and for three long miles it was thus they rode, the one clinging fiercely to the car’s steel side, the other clinging no less fiercely to the leg he could not see. In those brief minutes Cass saw the wheels below his toes, and remembered in terror a boy in a dark shirt sprawled in sand among cinders; he saw again a Mexican girl who had come for coal with a doll carriage.
When the train went into a hole for a passenger engine Clay gave him his hand, and Cass hitched himself up to safety. He was caked with coal dust, his face was bruised in a dozen places, he had lost his cap and skinned the knees out of his overalls; but he shouted, “Ah’m obleeged, fella.” The other made no reply. Cass began to laugh then, uncontrollably, at nothing at all; he laughed until his knees were shaking and his eyes were wet, and he could not stop even when he saw Clay looking at him in amazement. He became so weak with laughter that when Clay left him to seek another car he could not follow his friend for several minutes. By the time that he felt able to follow, Clay had disappeared somewhere down the spine. Cass was too shaken to follow far. He found an oil tanker, and sat all night with his back braced against the rounded side and his legs against a coupling, watching the Texas hills go by.
In the morning, in Houston, he found Clay once more; they went uptown to the Sally together. After eating they snuck out the rear entrance to avoid work, and returned to the Soupline tracks. Before dark they were on their way to New Orleans.
Cass could not sleep a wink that night for thinking of New Orleans. “Ah’ll bet there’s places to git tattooed on every corner, an’ showhouses an’ whorehouses with Creole gals.” Twice he saw small yellow lights gleaming in distance, and both times he had to rouse Clay, thinking he saw the lights of New Orleans. One city was about the same as another to Clay, however, and he merely rolled over, grumbling, “Fella, I’ve told you nine times now we can’t hit New Orleans before light. Them lights is still in Texas. You’d best be gettin’ yourself some rest whiles you still can get it.”
But Cass could not sleep. He sat in the open doorway of the swaying box, his legs dangling over the side, trying not to remember Nancy.
Great dim forests rose out of darkness, rose and fell to rise again; stretches of field where he smelled cane-soil, cone-shaped hills of high-heaped rice-husks that even in daytime would have looked like soft-coal mounds. The car roared through tiny hamlets darkened and steeping, and Cass fancied he smelled the wind off the Gulf. Sometimes sudden valleys opened beneath him—so deep that he drew himself back in brief fear; and just before dawn he grew very tired and curled up beside Clay to take a short nap. When he woke Clay was standing above him, sullenly digging him in the ribs with his toe.
The car was rolling very slowly. Cass blinked out into sun-lit fields. Then he jumped to his feet, brushed straw off his coat, and rolled a cigarette with Clay. How long he had slept! He saw by the sun that it was well past ten o’clock.
When they leaped to the ground Cass thought to see people—thousands of men and women, all rushing, all shoving and mauling and pushing each other; he thought to see towering buildings and streetcars roaring like trains through the midst of the press. But to his dismay he was still on the prairie, with only the long steel track ahead, and only the back end of a retreating caboose to amaze him. After walking a few miles they came to the houses of the Negro suburbs—little one-story shacks much like his own had been. Clay informed him that they now were in Gretna and that New Orleans lay west across the river. They turned down a pleasant street called Copernicus Avenue. A shaded, quiet little street lined by clean white cottages on either side; from porches and lawns Negro children paused in play to watch them as they passed.
“Goddamn,” Cass swore, “Ah nevah did see so many jigs in all mah life befo’—where ah come from we have lynchin’ bees to keep the population down.” He spoke loudly, in order that Clay would think he was tough.
Clay grunted assent. “Yep, niggers got all the jobs, everywhere, an’ that’s why you’n me is on the road. Up north they’s six dinges for every telygraph pole. A white man don’t stand a chance no more, anywhere.”
When they reached the ferry a nickel apiece was required. Clay paid for both without hesitation, but was irritated to see Cass take no apparent notice—Cass walked straight ahead onto the boat as though he owned half the wharf.
The truth was that Cass had really not seen, it had not even occurred to him that a fare might be required. And when they were half way across the river he turned to Clay and inquired, without even blushing from shame of ignorance, “Say, what ol’ river u this anyhow, fella?”
Clay looked at him to see if he were joking; he himself knew every large river from coast to coast. He saw that Cass was in earnest, and he saw too that Cass looked as dull as an ox with its jaw hanging open.
“The Hudson,” Clay said, and spat over the railing.
Cass only said “Oh.” He did not doubt for a moment, and did not sense the other’s contempt.
When the ferry docked Clay left him alone, walking off swiftly without a word. Cass was hurt, yet was not surprised. He merely thought to himself, “He just sees ah’m not like most others, that’s all. Reck’n ah’m a queer cuss one way or another.” It had happened often before, back in Great-Snake Mountain; so often there that he had grown up to expect others to go off from him, sooner or later. He did not understand this, he merely resigned himself to it.
He felt dreadfully alone.
He was not deeply concerned about eating or sleeping; yet he did wish to bathe, and he had no money. Seeing nothing which looked to him like a Sally, he asked the way of a fat fellow who stood about doing nothing. The fat one pointed silently straight down the street, and Cass went to a building bearing the sign: “Volunteer Prisoners’ Aid Society.” He could not read every word of this sign, and thought he was entering a Salvation Army home.. The man at the desk shook his head sadly—there was a fee here of twenty-five cents. If he didn’t have that he’d best go somewhere else. “Six blocks to the left and four down is a place. You’ll see the sign, bub.”
“Six blocks to the left and four down” proved to be twelve to the left, and ten down. Cass walked from one side of the city to the other before he finally found the place, and then recognized it only by a line of men waiting in front.
It was the Jesus-Saves mission.
Here he was given a little pile of something made from shredded cabbage and carrots, and a cup of cold chicory-coffee. While eating, he learned that there was a shower in the basement. The coffee gave him the courage to ask the commandant’s permission to bathe. But a blank had to be filled out before this could be done—and when the commandant gave him a pencil and paper in the office Cass almost wished he had not asked at all. It had been so long since he had teamed to read and write that now it only came with an effort. But he labored manfully with the pencil, and succeeded in writing his name again, after a fashion. As the official led him to the head of the staircase that wound down into the basement, he warned that the shower was cold. Cass cared not a button. Not even the descent into the chill cellar could dishearten him.
To get under the shower he had to wait some minutes for his turn. An old man stood under the feeble stream, scrubbing painful old joints. Cass waited in the doorway for him to finish. The light was so dim, the old man’s belly was so large, that its navel looked to Cass like a small incurved tunnelling into gray flesh such as he had seen small mole-things make in gray earth.
There was one other in the tiny room—the louse-runner, a lank and pockmarked man of perhaps sixty years. Cass watched this delouser, and he began to feel ashamed that he would have to undress and be naked before such a man. The fellow had a shameless eye, and a searching manner. And Cass was ashamed to be naked before anyone, for he felt that others could read too much of his life in the scars of his body, in his rounded shoulders, his pigeon chest, in the thinness of his arms and legs. His blood was still unquiet from the shame he had felt at being unable to write more than his name when the commandant had given him the pencil.
The louse-runner was crouched now over the old man’s clothes like a vulture hanging over a dung-heap. Holding his hands before his face beneath the little light, he rose slowly, with deliberation, studying his cupped palms as he rose. They were running with lice. He kicked the bundle off to the side without taking his eyes from his hands, and the old man held his head wistfully to one side, like an intelligent parrot.
“Extryord’nary,” he piped, “extryord’nary.”
The louse-runner brushed him from under the shower and stretched his hands under the water, rubbing his palms like cymbals together, as though to crush to mere pulp whichever lice might be so fortunate as to escape death through drowning. Then he shouted over his shoulder to someone unseen, and a pimple-faced youth with black rubber gloves came tearing down the stairs, took up the bundle in over-nice fingers, and carried it away to be fumigated.
Cass began to undress then. Slowly. How sorry he felt for that old man! How ashamed he had looked! But what if he himself should be found to have lice on him? The very thought made him desire retreat, even at this late hour. Better go dirty or wash in some river somewhere than to risk such shame! He felt the louse-runner watching, and he undressed more swiftly. Why must the man stare so? Did he think he might be a girl?
No socks to take off, no underwear. Dirt was frozen on him. The flesh of his arms and chest was blue-white, hairless and goose-pimpled. How ashamed he was to be so ugly!
The shower was as cold as the commandant had warned him, but there was plenty of a strong brown soap; by diligent scrubbing he got most of the dirt off, albeit in the process his fingers became numb with cold. He felt the louse-runner looking closely again, as he scraped at his ankles. “Ah’d do some better if he’d quit a-lookin’ at me like as if ah was some cold-shouldered colt,” Cass thought to himself.
The ordeal finished, he was given his clothes. For a moment Cass had the illogical notion that the louse-runner was disappointed at not having encountered a single louse in his overalls. When he was dressed Cass asked him for a cap, for it was cold in the place. The louser brought the matter before the commandant, in the latter’s office. There the commandant placed the entire responsibility back onto the louser’s shoulders. After some rummaging then, in the depths of the office clothes-closet, Cass was awarded a cotton cap that fitted down snugly over both ears and shaded his eyes with a peak so large that it lent him the aspect of a frequently-defeated jockey.
Observing himself in it in a little cracked tin mirror hanging on the clothes-closet door, he said to the commandant, “God damn, don’t it look jest fine, mister?” The commandant stiffened, Cass became afraid, the man was standing up and pointing to a red and white card on the far wall. Helplessly Cass looked at him, wondering with increasing fright what thing he had said or done to provoke this man’s anger.
“Ah caint read all that, mister—them’s too lawng words.” The commandant read for him, still pointing with outstretched arm.
IF YOU MUST USE PROFANITY PLEASE STEP OUT IN THE ALLEY
Cass began to feel a little better, and under his breath cursed both commandant and louse-runner roundly.
Later he wandered past the old French graveyard on Basin Street, and strolled, for curiosity’s sake, in and out of stores on Canal. In the Southern Railroad depot he found a fountain where water ran cold as ice. Then he walked back to Canal, remembering the wharves. He found the Desire Street wharf deserted, hung his shoes on a beam, padded his cap into a pillow, and slept. When he woke the sun was beginning to slant, and the river had turned from brown to cold green. Cass rose refreshed, and resumed his strolling.
All that late November afternoon he walked New Orleans in unconcern, caring not in the least which way he wandered. He passed by houses great and tall, stone mansions with strong iron gates; gates which barred wide paths winding through pleasant lawns. He looked through windows and saw white walls with pictures hanging; dimly Cass envied those within. He came, too, to houses much like his own had been: poor, unpainted, wooden . . . He saw black children who played within sight and smell of unmentionable filth, in alleys where gray rats ran. He saw the clean children of the rich, that they were quick and bold. On Melpomene Street he saw a young Negress with a baby on her back, pawing in a garbage barrel like an angular black cat. All afternoon Cass wandered.
Then it began to grow dark, and he forgot all that had happened at home and all that he had been on the road, for the lights of New Orleans came on, and he had never seen any lights quite so bright.
The lights of the city! The sounds of the street! It was just as though somewhere a switch had been thrown, making all things of a sudden gay and brilliant and beautiful, just for him. Canal Street thronged with men and women, a thousand gay faces passed him by. Signs went on and off. Everyone was happy and laughing, everyone was talking, everyone hurried. The people were almost as he had imagined—but such lights he had not dreamed of. Cass had never heard such sounds. Green and blue and red the lights, flashing on and off and dancing; loud and soft and strange the sounds, all wonderfully confused. Directly above his head an orchestra blared through open windows into the southern night, and Cass stood long with neck upturned and mouth agape. And after a while he walked on, and he came to a quieter place. Signs went on and off. Then he came to a street where there were no signs.
Cass came to a street that lay all deserted and unlit by any lamp or little window-gleam, and he went down a walk so narrow that on it but one could pass at a time. And he felt that all houses here were evil and old, that all their shades were drawn for shame; and that though the street was deserted and dark, yet there were women behind the shades; and that though the street was so soundless, so sad, behind the curtains men were laughing. So he walked on, and walked always more softly.
A girl stepped out of a doorway he had not seen, hooked him by the arm and looked up smiling. A foolish smile, weak. Then she pursed her lips that were pale as death, and spoke in a blurred Alabama drawl. “Look daddy, y’all like to sleep with me tonight? Ah’m clean as cotton, daddy, an’ y’all kin take yo’ own good time.” They were almost to the corner, where streets were lit luridly. The girl spoke swiftly, urging him to walk slowly. “Y’all don’t have to pay me till yo’ see what yo’ gettin’. Don’t have to pay me till afterwhile, hon, if yo’ don’t want to pay me right off.”
She placed his hand on her breast, and he paused. Wonderingly Cass touched her, pressing her breast half fearfully. How soft that was! Cass had never touched a woman before; as in a haze now he remembered the dark girls in back of the Poblano Cafe. She drew him aside and let him explore her until she felt that he was aroused; then she led him back to the doorway from which she had hailed him. She led him easily. His heart began zig-zagging wildly, desire and daring sent warm waves through his flesh. Should he? Should he take the chance—without money? Well, hadn’t she said he didn’t have to pay until after while? Maybe he’d only . . . maybe by then . . . His head was whirling, his thoughts raced crazily. When they reached the doorway he put down desire for a moment and drew back to tell her he had not a penny. But she caressed him into the passageway before he could speak three words.
Somewhere in the back a man was laughing, a young man, judging by his laughter. The doors of the passage were numbered; against No. 14 Cass set aside his misgivings. He took her about and kissed the pale lips. The girl knew every trick to arouse him, and he pressed her against the door with all the thin strength of his loins. She laughed, a metallic little laugh, then struggled free and opened the door against which he pressed her.
After the lock clicked behind her she lit a small lamp. Its glow lit faintly on the wall a picture of a bleeding heart in an oval frame. The girl went to the bed and sat on its edge, fingering a small silver cross at her throat. Seated beside her, Cass put his arms about her; sweat began rolling down the inside of his shirt from under his armpits. The girl rose and turned down the lamp till its flare was small as a match’s glow . . .
Cass slept only briefly; when he woke it was still dark. He woke with a start, with a fear at his heart. Fear that the girl might waken before he got out. He became so afraid that he could scarcely breathe in his anxiety to get through the door.
Yet he knew he had to take it easy, rise softly, step softly, go soft as a cat across the floor, softly as a young cat just half way across the room. The door was locked. He turned the knob all the way around twice without making a sound; he put all his weight against it without making a noise. It was locked, but he knew where the key was. He’d seen it on her dresser, saw it now in the dimness from where he stood. But when he reached the dresser what he had thought was a key proved to be only a small silver nail file. He opened a drawer, it had to be in there since it wasn’t on top. The dresser squeaked, and behind him he heard the whore jump up; in the dresser mirror he saw that, naked as she was, she stood at the door to block his way out. Cass turned about slowly, a half-grin smeared over half his face, his hair hanging in his eyes. He was faint with such fear as before he had never known.
How savage she stood! All naked and snarling!
“Nancy! Nancy!” Cass wanted to shout, “Nancy—come help me now!”
But there was no room in his throat for a sound; his throat seemed closed with fear. It was the girl who called out.
“Jack! Jack Gaines!” she shrilled like a magpie, “Jack! Jack Gaines!”
Cass heard heavy feet come pounding through darkness, a side-door opened and a half-clad blond came in. He was breathing heavily; the hair on his chest seemed matted with sweat. Cass watched the chest, saw its yellow matting moving, rhythmically up and down, the while the fellow regained his breath.
“The fartsnatcher ain’t give me a dime yet, Jackie, an’ he tried to heel out with mah ring on top of it. Ah’m gettin’ tired of gettin’ rooked by every punk who comes along—see what he got an’ whatever yo’ gits.”
Cass saw the rouster coming toward him in a half-crouch, like a professional wrestler. For just one moment then it seemed to Cass that someone was tickling him in the pit of the stomach with a blood-tipped feather—and he was on the floor beneath the man, and the feather was a sharp-pointed stick jabbing and splintering in his gut. He found his voice with his face thrust nose-deep in carpet.
“Ah got nothin’, mister—ol’ girl tol’ me ah didn’ have to pay nothin’—ah was but lookin’ fo’ th’ key—ah was but—”
A short swift blow with the heel of the palm caught his tongue full between his teeth and sent red waves of red pain into his brain; so that of a sudden he saw Bryan lying flat on his back and Stuart above him, kicking. Such strength did fear then give him that he threw off the heavy rouster with a single effort of his back, struggled crazily to his feet and raced in blind panic to the hall door, forgetting that that door was locked. Straining at the knob, he heard the rouster coming up behind him, turned and dodged the fellow, and tore across the room to the side-door standing wide.
The last thing Cass recalled was the white blur of the girl’s body beneath the red blur of a bleeding heart. She was in that doorway with her legs spread wide, she was holding the bed-post with her left hand—and some dark and heavy thing hung straight down out of the right.
Pain wakened Cass. A long, slow-starting, zig-zag pain that began in his viscera and ran jaggedly upward with gathering speed until it flashed like an orgasm beneath his heart, and left him sick and sweating. Twice it went through him like an electric bolt, leaving him each time sicker, number.
Cass did not open his eyes; he did not wish now to waken. He was cold, and frightened by the severity of his pain so that, as he sweated, he trembled a little. He did not wish to wake up. He wanted to sleep now. He wanted to sleep so long that he would never wake up. If once he opened his eyes, he knew, he would have to start living all over again. He would have to get to his feet and see men and women, would have to be tired and cold and alone. He would have to go begging, be mocked, shamed and beaten.
So he lay long, in the place where he was, and he would not open his eyes. And he could not return to sleep because of the pain in his belly. Then he began to feel cold, so cold; so cold that when he touched the roof of his mouth with his tongue he thought that, whatever was wet there, was frozen.
And because he was so utterly wretched, being unable to sleep or to rise, he whimpered. Tears forced his eyes open, he saw where he lay.
He was lying in an open lot that appeared to be chiefly a dumping ground. It smelled of dead flesh. The first thing he saw clearly was the head of a dog whose body was gone. That head smiled amiably, there were ants in both eyes. He rose stiffly, wondering that no one had seen him lying there. New Orleans was already gray with morning.
Cass did not know where to go, he did not know quite where he was. And he didn’t care greatly, one way or the other, and walked on only to avoid the stares that strangers would give him should he stand still. He could think only of Nancy, could only wish that he were not alone now. Nancy would tend him, tend him out of love. He touched his face, gingerly, and he felt dry blood beneath his chin—blood dried into clots like great rough scabs there. And down from the corner of his mouth ran a deep furrow into the flesh—his mouth jerked sidewise when he tried to touch the wound. Apparently the devils had tried to cut his throat.
He was too ill to walk very far at a stretch. Every few hundred yards he sat down on curbstone or step. He was glad that it was still early morning so that there were not many people—strangers—to stare at him as he rested. People—strangers—to stare as he sat. All people were strangers, he was born to be stared at. His belly burned for water.
Resting on a wooden bench in front of a little Italian grocery, Cass watched two children at play. Black children, skipping. For a minute he almost forgot his own wretchedness in watching their joy. But the man from the grocery came out, looked at him twice, shrugged his shoulders, and told him he would have to sit somewhere else. The bench was for customers, he had no room inside for it, his customers came out here and ate breakfast upon it. He might have a customer any minute now. Perhaps the customer would like to sit on the bench. Perhaps the customer would like to sit on the bench with nobody near him when he ate breakfast.
When Cass rose that time he felt as though somebody had just turned on an electric fan in his belly that whizzed hot dry air in long ripples down his stomach’s lining. Long dry ripplings, all the way down, with a whirring there as of many blades. He felt the fingers of one hand with those of the other: they were cold. His head: it was hot. People were passing, morning was blue-gray again; and he needed a drink of water.
He walked till he saw a filling station, and he looked about for a hose. There was no one about the station that he could see. A fuzzy ball of a police pup lapped water from the tank wherein inner-tubes were tested. Inside, between a safe and a rack of colorful road maps, Cass saw water in a tall glass barrel. Paper cups were hanging above it. But before he’d taken two steps toward it, a voice behind him called him back.
“They’s nothin’ inside for you there, bub. The can is around the rear.”
Cass turned and saw the attendant, a dashing fellow in white overalls. He was cranking gas swiftly into the tank of a maroon roadster with frosted-sugar headlights.
“Ah oney want a drink is all,” Cass said turning half way around.
The attendant made no reply. He kept cranking endlessly, bending a little as he cranked and watching the hand of the pump-clock swinging. Cass watched too, while little tongues of flame singed the roof of his mouth. The mission would be on the other side of town—and he had to drink right now. The puppy lapped noisily at his feet; Cass had an urge to kick it and run. The attendant walked around the other side of the roadster to inspect its oil; no one was watching.
Carefully, cautiously with averted eyes, he lifted the pup off the ground with his shoe, holding it by its furry middle, and flung it hard as he was able toward the cement base of the pump. It landed softly, sprawling against stone, yelped once as it regained its feet, sneezed and went off sneezing.
That made Cass feel a little better; as though the boot had been put on the other foot for a change. As though he had just outwitted an enemy. And then it seemed to Cass that he could smell all that water standing so near, with all the clean white paper cups hanging right above it. He could smell it while his throat shriveled for one wet drop—he turned, ripped cups down, caught one after dropping three; and then, in using both hands to turn on the water, crushed the cup flat between his palms. As he stooped to retrieve one which he had dropped, the water began flooding the floor; he forgot about cups in a desperate effort to close the faucet before he was caught. In his haste he jammed the handle; the floor was littered with paper cups, it seemed to him, before he finally slammed the faucet off—paper cups afloat in a flood like a back-flooding sewer.
“Whew!” he gasped, stepping back, having in his excitement almost forgotten his thirst, “Whew! Ah shet it jest in time.”
But it hadn’t been in time at all.
“Well, isn’t this nice now, I must say. Couldn’t you leak a little on the desk for me too before you have to be leaving?”
This voice was a whip, contemptuously coiling. Cass flinched as though he were about to be spat upon—then a hand on his collar, he was reel-spinning through space; he was going face-forward; he felt the boot bite in deep, deep at the base of the spine where his father’s boot would have bitten, sending him onto the concrete of the driveway with his wrists straining stiffly in front of his face to save himself a bruised nose as he fell. Then he picked up and ran, dodging crazily in and out of Canal Street traffic, fancying the attendant hard on his heels. He ran along the steep curbing, while passersby stared for two full blocks. Then he could go no farther; he could have run not one step farther that time had there been a whole mob of attendants at his heels all shouting “Law that guy!”
And his throat, if it had known thirst before, was now varnished with it, like an asphalt road smoking in sun. He could not even spit now, he could not dampen his lips with his tongue. Hard hands were wringing his stomach out, as Nancy would wring out a gray dish rag. And his stomach was nothing more than a dark furnace for his thirst. Traffic was picking up down South Rampart; from an unseen corner a peanut-whistle twittered tinnily.
No one had spoken of thirst in the jungle. He had not been told about being kicked. Nobody had said much about shame and mockery.
He went into the first restaurant he saw and found it crowded with men eating oatmeal. The waitresses were too rushed to say “No,” so Cass just stood there, a little inside the door and a little off to the side, shifting uneasily from one loot to the other. And when he became too ashamed to stand and shift that way any longer, he left.
On the corner of Camp and Felicity people were thronging out of a church. Dimly Cass wondered whether Catholics would drink holy water if they were as thirsty as he was and had no other water to drink. Then the hands on his stomach were hard and callused, as Nancy’s hands had become; he walked on while they wrenched and wrung, thinking of Nancy and Nancy’s hands. Till he came to a second gas station. The water-tank here was enamelled white. A slender bronze statue stood on its peak, a little naked man with wings on both heels, standing on tiptoe as though preparing to glide off the tank and by out the door into the sun above the Camp Street palms.
Cass looked about a little more covertly than before. This time he would do differently; this time he would plead so piteously that he could not be denied.
The attendant was a Negro.
“What is it, son?” he asked just as though he really thought Cass might reply, “Ten gallon o’ gas in mah lawng maroon roadster.”
The black face was smiling like a full moon in eclipse. It looked, somehow, kind.
“Mister, kin ah git a drink heah?”
“Sho! Theah!”
But he wasn’t pointing straight at the ice-water tank with the little bronze man on its peak. He was pointing off to the side a little. He was pointing, in fact, to the radiator hose. Meekly Cass went there and drank from a rusty nozzle. The water was warm, with the warmth of stale urine, a sticky, sweetish-sour warmth like that of sodden pickles. When it trickled through his fingers it trickled dark amber; in the palm of one hand it left small specks like the specks that flies leave in summer in milk. Perhaps, Cass thought, such specks were only soot. “Just good ol’ root, that’s all. Mebbe them little speck-things’ll just make it meaty-like, sort of, so’s ah wont have to hunt up that derned Jesus-Saves joint all over town agen.”
After he had swilled down almost a pint of the muddy stuff, he washed the dotted blood off his mouth and dried his lips on the back of his hand.
He didn’t feel any better, somehow. He felt sick. He felt sick and lonely. He didn’t want to go to Jacksonville after all. He didn’t even want to see Baton Rouge. He wanted to go home.
And with no further ado he turned toward the wharves.
