Somebody in Boots

by Nelson Algren

  But as she slept at last and he lay yet awake, Cass felt a bond growing that grew ever stronger.

  Nights of peril . . . nights of love; . . . days of hiding . . . nights of love.

  Then fast-passing weeks, fraught with peril though they were, were yet for Cass happier by far than any he had ever before known. Indeed, the very dally peril in which he now lived added something of a shadow zest to his new manner of existence. In short order Norah taught him to read and write once more, and to do simple calculations; these were achievements that gave him a new confidence.

  He had first begun to feel fully a man after effecting an escape at Nubby’s expense; dally now he strengthened that feeling. Norah’s nearness gave him strength, was at the root of all he now felt. It was her affection which melted shadows in which he had crouched for too long: the shadow of shame, and the shadow of fear. To be without these was to come into sun. It was to find himself, in one day almost, rid of a pain so old that beneath its weight he had become almost unaware of its heaviness. Pain had been with him much as it is with a man who loses a leg: he had become so used to an aching that he had ceased almost to feel it. His head felt clear for the first time in his life.

  Such a sudden coming into the sun, after the night that had been so long, gave Cass moments of joy which were, in a manner, ecstatic: he would prance half-naked across the floor, singing, laughing, chattering, teasing. He would imitate for Norah the speech of mountain folk. He shrugged off self-consciousness like an unclean hood. Norah would laugh at him in these moments; but sometimes as she watched his face while it smiled or laughed it would seem to her that it was unwashed of something adolescent. The film of puberty was still upon it. Sometimes, while eating, he picked at his scar: then she would draw his fingers away from his face.

  And he talked constantly. From morning till night he wagged on and on. He spoke of everything that drifted into his mind—of what someone back home had once said about Northerners, or of the automobiles cruising in the street below, or of some man or woman he once had known. There was no stopping him. Since he seemed to require no answers save those himself supplied, Norah soon came to pay little heed to the streaming of his tongue. Sometimes he scribbled on paper a long column of figures, added them, and then insisted that she add them also in order to see whether his total had been correct. He had an implicit faith in whatever answer she gave.

  He realized now that heretofore he had been ill. He had been ill and he had not known. His head had been clogged with darkness, and now it was clear. He had always been aware, dimly, of a darkness in the back of his brain, it was only now that he could look back and see, clearly, that he had been dimly aware.

  Nights of peril . . . nights of love; . . . days of hiding . . . nights of love.

  13

  WHEN CASS HAD but ten dollars left in his pocket, he bought, with half that sum, a small Smith and Wesson.

  The purchase was not hard to manage. The house held half a dozen gunmen, any one of whom was willing to sell anything he possessed, from his body to his weapons or his woman. Cass bought the gun from a punch-drunk whorehouse lackey on the second floor, and he bought it with Norah’s knowledge.

  When the remaining five dollars had dwindled to two and a quarter he left the house alone, at night. For the first time in his life he went toward danger without fear. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it well. He had found something worth fighting for, and he was going to fight. In the only way he knew how.

  On State and Congress he hailed a cab and directed the driver straight west on Lake. He sat hunched up in the rear, watching the fare roll up on the fare-clock. When the clock jumped to two dollars and five cents he jumped a little with it. Then he composed himself by drawing his gun, patting it, and muttering a low assurance to it.

  “Ah’m Tex McKay an’ ah take mah time. Ah treat mah woman right.”

  When the clock reached three-sixty the driver turned his head for further directions. “Let him feel cold steel an’ he won’t make trouble,” Nubby had counseled.

  So Cass pressed the steel of the barrel into the flesh above the fellow’s collar, and gave him several directions. The car swerved wildly toward the curb, the cabbie grabbed the wheel in panic, straightened it out and kept it straight, then listened to his customer’s directions. Cass spoke low and right in his ear, so that the fellow’s lips began to quiver as though he were either about to curse or to cry. “Don’t holler,” Cass warned, then added, “Turn right at the next corner an’ park.”

  After the fellow had turned right, and parked, his customer spoke again.

  “Now open up or ah’ll open you-all up.”

  The cabbie opened the till without a word and came out as Cass ordered. Cass heard his own voice then: it was steady. It told the driver things without actually saying them. It told the driver it wasn’t afraid of the job it was doing. It told the driver it didn’t mean to be caught.

  “Whyn’t you guys ever pick on a Checker or Yellow?” the cabbie asked. “I can’t even make gas-money these times.” He was a little man, unshaven and ragged.

  “Shut up,” Cass said. “Shut up or ah’ll bash yo’ head into a goddamn blood-puddin’,” and he felt pretty tough when he said that. When he had gotten everything there was in the till, even to the nickels and dimes, he made the driver climb into the seat again.

  “Nubby’d knock him cold now or else cop the cab,” he told himself.

  But he himself seemed unable to do either. He hadn’t the heart to hurt the trembling cabbie and he couldn’t drive the cab. So he said “Git out,” and the driver stumbled out again. Then they walked into the alley, and for a block and a half Cass prodded him to make him keep on walking. The fellow stumbled, muttered under his breath, and sobbed something about a wife. In the middle of the second block, on the spur of the moment, Cass stepped back into darkness.

  It was hue and cry then. He’d done a foolhardy thing, the alley was blind. He clambered over two fences and roused a dog before he reached Lake Street again. He caught a car atmost in the middle of the block, grabbing it as he would a swaying boxcar; and he was going east. As he stood in the darkness up front next to the motorman he heard the long wail of the police-siren rising to the west. It rose in a shrill, wild warning, then died to a whisper, thin, trembling, still penetrating. He left the car and ran in a half-slouch beneath the shadow of the Lake Street L. A train thundered overhead, and Cass mounted the steps two at a time. “Ain’t nothin’ more ah can do ’cep’ keep goin’ as fast as ah can,” he panted—“all ah can do now is keep goin’ an’ hope.” As he paced up and down on the half-deserted L platform a squad car flashed beneath him going east, siren screeching. Cass could tell when that squad overtook the streetcar by the way its siren broke off in the middle. Then it was coming back: coming back straight west on Madison.

  His train rolled up, its broad doors opened wide, he was inside in brightness, he was going swiftiy. He picked up a copy of the Herald-Examiner from a seat and hid his face behind comic-strips all the way down to the Loop. Not untll he was back in the heart of the Loop did his courage desert him. He was mingling with an after-theater crowd on Michigan when he realized, in one sudden moment, that he had escaped, and when he realized this fully the reaction took him.

  He wanted to run—he could scarcely suppress the desire to race wildly, screaming, to go zigzagging aimlessly down the boulevard, to run shouting up the staircase to the room, to get away — to get away . . .

  So weak with shock was he that twice on the staircase he had to sit down to rest. He sat with his head in his hands, and he whimpered. He rolled his head between his hands and pounded his temples with his fists to quiet the wild throbbing there. When he walked onto the room Norah rolled off the bed and switched on the light. She took one look at him, and went for the whiskey. His shirt was drenched with sweat, and his face was so pale that its freckles stood out like moles. He sank into a chair and tried to open his collar, but his fingers fumbled helplessly about t
he collar’s button. Norah opened it for him, held a whiskey glass to his lips, and took off his shoes. His socks were as wet as though he’d been wading. She sat up with him until he ceased to tremble, and by then it was too late to go to bed. Before that morning had passed, they moved. Just walked out and didn’t come back. Took the first clean apartment they found, a two-room affair off Erie and Huron, near the old watertower.

  He had gotten forty-one dollars, and the sum lasted them three weeks. Then they moved again. Norah didn’t have to sit up half the night feeding him whiskey the second time; that time they moved the minute he came in. They took another furnished apartment two blocks away on a street whose name, by a coincidence which pleased them both, was the same as his own: Cass Street.

  After two forty-dollar hauls Norah began to call him her “forty-dollar man.”

  “I’ll go out with you, hon,” she said, “Maybe I’ll bring you luck an’ well clean up big.” She spoke half in jest, and he answered in jest.

  But she persisted in the suggestion until he said, “Promise y’all won’t shoot nobody if ah buy another rod an’ we go out t’gether to Cicero some night?”

  “I used to live in Cicero,” she said. “I know that town like a book.”

  Then she promised, solemnly, and he bought the gun.

  The first robbery which they committed together was of a small drugstore on Irving Park Boulevard. When they entered there was no one in the store but a clerk, a chinless fledgeling with a ptomaine eye; Cass covered him while Norah emptied the till. She took her time, as he had told her she must, emptying everything into her purse. She left the store first and made her getaway south. Cass left just one minute later by the drugstore dock. Not until late the next afternoon did they see each other again, when they met in the River Hotel on North Ctark.

  Cass arrived first, just as dusk was coming down on the river. This was April dusk, and he recalled, standing by the open window, the dusk of another April, in another place. Along the river far below little lights began to grow. He saw a light creeping slowly beneath a bridge. He stood watching in darkness until he heard Norah’s knock. Then he switched on the light and hurried to the door.

  “I got no idee how much I got, hon,” she said the moment she entered. She tossed him her purse, stretched herself on the bed and added, “I was too lazy to count it all. I think it’s a lot this time.”

  She watched him narrowly while he counted. He licked his thumb with each bill he touched and she said, “You lose time spittin’ on your hand every time you count a dollar.” He had to begin all over again then. She felt a little bit glad that she’d annoyed him.

  As soon as he finished she asked, “How much?”

  “How much yo’ reck’n?” He felt like teasing her now. There was more than he had expected.

  Norah Egan pursed her lips, frowned, and deliberated aloud, “I seen three twenties on top when I opened the register, so I s’pose there’s—oh, let’s see—seventy-five—eighty bucks about—yeah?”

  Cass replaced the bills, zipped the purse shut, and tossed it across to the dresser. Then he sat down beside her on the bed.

  “How much yo’ reck’n?’” He put one arm about her.

  “Well, a hundred say then . . .”

  “Gettin’ wa’m, Blondie.”

  “Eighty-five?”

  “Cold.”

  She sat straight up, her eyes brightened and narrowed; it seemed to Cass that she was already exulting, and he wished that she wouldn’t look quite so anxious. He wished that she were half-feigning such eagerness.

  “Jesus Christ, Red, tell me you ain’t kiddin’.”

  He could not see how well she was feigning.

  “’xac’ly four dollars under five hundred, hon. Ah’ve not yet counted the silver.”

  His voice sounded lifeless.

  Easy come, easy go.

  Get smart like us, yokels—it’s smart to be smart. Some day we’ll be snatched, you say? Well, being snatched and being locked up are two different things, yokels. You got to take a chance no matter what you do, don’t you? And the bigger the chance the bigger the rake-off. You got to be smart, it’s smart to be smart. This is the town to make fast jack; if you can’t do it here, why then you’re a yokel.

  Cass and Norah would lie abed every morning till ten, they would idle pleasantly through the forenoon; then, if the day was warm, drive along the lake or through the park, in the evenings they sometimes took a bus ride, because Norah didn’t enjoy driving the car at night. Too much traffic. Some nights they’d go to a movie, some nights they’d stay home and read, and play the victrola. Cass would read aloud to her from True Romance.

  Norah invented a pet name for him which she used only on special occasions. “Lunky” she called him; and he called her “Kitten.”

  “He called me ‘Haybag’ at first,” she thought, “but now he calls me ‘Kitten’.” And yet she was pleased to be called such a name, for she felt the name had some truth: she knew that her grace was both young and feline; she knew how cruelly, yet how smoothly and softly, she could yield this man her body. She became aware of a new lightness in her limbs; she felt again how supple her young strength could be. Sometimes, after dark, she danced for him a while; and such moments of night were for Cass strange and still beyond any moments he had ever before known.

  He saw her once standing nude in a subdued blue light, her hair undone and transformed by a lamp’s glow from its daytime yellow to a strange dark blue: it cascaded down her shoulders like a living blue torrent. She saw him watching and closed her eyes, to sway indolently with head backstraining, her hands on her breasts. Bathed as she was in blue cloud and black shadow, she seemed to Cass to be swaying in sleep and in dream. Behind her a darkened wall panel formed for her body a frame that meltingly became a part of herself: to Cass it seemed that that panel was no longer oak, but was instead some fragment of night struck to solidity and wood for one brief passing moment. When she ceased to sway it would fade back into night, into stuff of shadow, stuff of dream.

  “Star an’ Garter stuff, Kitten,” he said; and he could have bitten his tongue the moment he said it. She opened her eyes slowly, looked at him half-incredulously, and then stepped quickly out of the light. She never danced for him again. Nothing he could ever say could make her dance for him again.

  The happiest moments of that spring for Cass were the long walks he and Norah took along the lake. Once they were sitting among the white rocks that form the breakwater in a long curve below the boat harbor, and he told her that she resembled the lake because it was at night that both were most alive. Below them slow waves washed quietly, all that night; and there was a strangeness about white rocks and slow waves that Cass had not felt since a lilac bloomed, in a dooryard rain, one spring night seven years past.

  “The lake’s a little hard to catch on to, Kitten,” he said. “First ah figgered it made me feel so homesick-like ’cause it was always so unnatural damn big, jest like ah thought y’all made me feel homesick fo’ mah sister ’cause y’all were perty like Nance. Oney it weren’t the bigness at all hardly, Norah. Wasn’t ’cause the lake looked so big anymore that it was ’cause yo’ seemed like Nance. ’Cause ah’ve gotten kind o’ used to the bigness now, got used to yore pertiness even—but ah still have that feelin’ ah cain’t hardly deescribe ’bout y’all an’ the lake. Like ah could jest git drowned in you someway, or elts mebbe get drowned swimmin’ somewhere out there. Do ah talk screwy, Kitten?”

  “A little, yeah. Only say some more anyhow,’ cause it all sounds like somethin’ I read once. It’s nice. I’d like to read books again like I used.”

  “Well, ah cain’t any more stop feelin’ the strangeness of the lake than ah could stop lovin’ y’all. It’s that strangeness that gets me, Kitten—not the bigness. Jest like ah love y’all not ’cause yore eyes is brown, oney jest cause it’s you, Norah.”

  She turned to him, being pleased, kissed him lightly, and laughed low.

  Sometime
s they rode the bus-tops together, and then her hair blew lightly against his cheek. His arm held her closely, her head lay on his shoulder; he would feel the pressure like velvet of her bare arm and firm thigh.

  How happy Cass felt in such moments of closeness! If he but shut his eyes his head swam with happiness; there would be a strong sweet singing all through him, as of the blood in his veins rejoicing in its own flow. Once from a bus-top he felt like calling out to some strangers walking below him, “Poor blind ones down there! Look up to where Cass is! This is me, this is Cass—up here with Norah! Kitten loves me—she and I sleep together! Every night I kiss her, it’s just me that Kitten loves. I’m Cass—you remember? This is Norah, and she loves me.”

  Sometimes when he lay by her side in the night Norah was already sleeping; he would think to himself as he felt himself dozing, “I’m falling asleep now—and when I wake up Pa will be just coming in from the kitchen, Bryan will be asleep right here beside me, and Nance will be fetching wood for the stove” . . . But when he awoke it would still be Norah beside him, his head resting on the carpet of her hair. Everything around him would be warm and clean and bright, on the floor a new rug, deep and dark and soft. The breeze that comes off the lake in the mornings of summer would be rippling the curtains ever so gently; gently so as not to wake Norah. Then it would seem to Cass that all this was so good that there could be no dark smoke-filled places anywhere in the world. It would seem that nowhere could there be a dim room with dirt for a floor, where once a small boy had lived in fear of a father.

  It was dream-like now, in this place, to recall it.

  One morning Cass was wakened by shouts and cries from the street below. Raising his head from the pillow, he saw grotesque shadows racing down a long red fence, jumping up and jumping down, waving monstrous arms over headless bodies, first running this way, and then, all with one motion turning, racing back in the direction they’d come. For a moment the red fence itself seemed to be moving. Cass became deathly afraid. Ever since the time in Great-Snake Mountain when he had seen a crowd pointing and shouting as though all out of one mouth he had been afraid, above all else that he feared, of a mob.