Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren

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.

       4

      WHEN CASS CAME to the ferry he saw that a fare was required, and he formed the hasty opinion then that the ferry was free were one going west across the river, but cost a nickel when one went east. He stood at the side in his tattered overalls with blood on his mouth half-coagulated, while hot bolts of pain tore him and thirst came anew, and he begged. He begged humbly, with one palm outstretched. An elderly woman put a nickel in the box for him, and he limped out onto the boat.

      It took him two hours to retrace the streets he had walked with Clay on the previous morning. When he reached the S.P. tracks at noon, he lay down in spare and cindery grass, and slept with his shoe for a pillow. He did not waken until the freight to Houston roused him; it took all his strength to swing up a ladder. As soon as he found an empty he fell once more to sleep, this time to waken only to change freights in Houston, early in the morning hours. On the outskirts of San Antonio he ate at the same beanery where he had eaten with Clay the week before. for had his name really been Clancy?) That same night he was on his way back to Great-Snake Mountain.

      Slouched down in the cool dark of a fruit-car reefer, he smelled thousands of ripening oranges all night. All night long he smelled them. He could see them dimly, stacked high as the roof, only a few feet from his finger-tips. He would have liked to suck on one for a while, but because of the reefer’s steel screening there was no reaching them at all.

      He had learned that for him, Cass McKay, there was no escape from brutality. He had learned that, for him, there was no asylum from evil or pain or long loneliness. It might be that for others there was something different; but for him lonely pain and lonely evil were all that there was in the whole wide world. The world was a cruel place, all men went alone in it. Each man went alone, no two went together. Those who were strong beat those who were weak. They who said they loved Jesus wore little spiked boots, and those who kept silent ran swiftly away. There was only one God, and he was a devil; he was everything that there was in the world, for he was all pain and all evil. He was all that was secret and dark and unclean. There were only two kinds of men wherever you went—the men who wore boots, and the men who ran. You must not try to take that which belonged to another