“Norah!” he called, “Wake up! Look downstairs. Somethin’s up!”
Norah opened her eyes, swung her legs lazily to the door, and stepped, still yawning, into blue-tasseled mules; leisurely she went to the window.
“Just a bunch of Reds puttin’ on their act,” she reported, “Niggers an’ white guys listenin’ to a nigger talkin’ from a car, an’ a whole gang of sheenies runnin’ up an’ downstairs draggin’ furniture into a house.”
Coming back to the bed and seating herself beside him, she combed his tousled morning head soothingly with her hands.
“Scare you a mite, Lunky?”
“Jest a mite,” he confessed.
Behind her thin night-dress he felt her full breast’s young warmth, its soft fall and rise.
“That’s the third time this week.”
“What’s the matter with them folks anyhow?” he asked.
“Bunch of dizzy kikes I guess, that’s all.”
He plucked at his scar, and she drew his fingers away from it. “Don’t do that, honey,” she asked. “It looks awful nasty.”
Norah didn’t like kikes.
Norah and Cass disliked moving so frequently. Both wanted some place where they could live without absolute secrecy, some place where they could stay a year, if they wished, without having to move once. Norah found such a house. It was on Orleans Street, a big three-story frame building owned by a woman named Josie Hill.
They had lived on the fringe of Chicago’s vast underworld. Now they moved into its very heart.
The house on Orleans Street was known from coast to coast as “a safe hole.” Here lived men and women whose whole lives had been given to beggary and theft. Cass and Norah came to know Lon Costello, an old man who simulated a racking cough as a livelihood and hence was known as “T.B.” There was Lon’s partner-in-crime, a little half-witted jew known only as “Stir-Nuts.” There was Anthony Brown, known as a “dinger”; he twisted his right arm out of shape every morning, and returned, his arm back in position and his pockets jingling, before the day was done. He was a young Alabaman who claimed that his true profession was gambling, and he was only “dinging it” to get a gambling-stake together. His most frequent boast was that in the winter of 1929 he had dropped five thousand dollars in a single day at Tia Juana.
Others here were transient: each day new faces came and left. The owner of the house was an elderly woman who bore on her face the marks of a lifetime of furtive living. Lon Costello told Cass that she had bought the house with the proceeds of twenty years of work as a “D.D.” She had begged, playing mute, from city to city and prison to prison, until now in her dotage she owned a house. To Lon her success in life was enviable. He would have married her at the drop of a hat; but she would have none of him, he said.
Anthony Brown assured Cass that he would, with a few days’ training, make an excellent “wire”—a pickpocket. Lon wanted to teach Norah “The Black Hood” act, but Norah objected strenuously. “The Black Hood” was a woman who sat with a baby in her arms and a cup by her side, in some neighborhood where the danger of arrest was not large. Lon offered, for a ten percent cut of the proceeds, to find the neighborhood, the baby, and the cup. He was full of such projects, and when he was refused he only laughed and proposed another “squawk.”
There were sluggers and gunmen here, mostly stolid, uncommunicative fellows who had a silent contempt for the beggars, dingers, and squawkers about them. Cass classified himself among the gunmen; but it was odd that, without question, the gunmen seemed to put him into the same category as Lon Costello and Anthony Brown. He soon learned that Norah and himself were not yet of the elite of this world. Showing his Smith and Wesson at every opportunity somehow failed to impress. Talking loudly seemed to bring quiet smiles.
On the second floor lived a “throwout,” a fellow who could throw his joints out of place at will; he was a card-sharper on the side, and offered to teach Cass rare card-tricks at a dollar a trick. This card-sharper-throwout was an Assyrian with a long tragic face, and he held a social position midway between that of the dinger and the gunman. Others in the house called him “Ashes” and looked at him a little in fear. Cass went to him to iearn, despite Lon Gostello’s counsel not to go near the man. Lon hated to see anyone spend a dollar on another man’s project while he himself had so many better ones for sale.
For hours each day Cass sat with the Assyrian trying to learn sleight-of-hand. He was far too awkward, and after two weeks he abandoned the idea in favor of a simpler trick which Lon offered to teach both himself and Norah free. Every morning all through that summer Norah and Cass sat with Lon or Anthony Brown learning idle games across a kitchen table. Across the table sunlight slanted, and the cards slapped softly from hand to hand. Through the open window the roar of the L curving toward the Loop became a familiar sound. Children fought and played in the street below, and peddlers cried out from the alleys. This was Little Italy, and the streets were alive with dark folk from morning till night, and all night long.
Outside the window lay the city, basking under sun or sleeping through the summer night. Down to the Oak Street beach the Italians took their children. Cass and Norah followed them down and slept in each other’s arms on the shore.
This was the tragic meeting-place of men, the brief city sprung out of the prairie and falling again into dust. This was the gathering-ground between the years, here humans bred for an hour and died. Some of these in this place wore pants, others wore dresses. Some here were hairy and some were hairless, and all went down to the beach together, talking, beneath great stars, in a tongue ten million years younger than their brains. Thus the eons of spawning in the teeth of decay, ten million years of defeat and lusting, war and disease and conquest, had at last brought them gabbing to this place. They would eat pink popcorn balls here, have dreams at night, ride streetcars a while, and die, and decay; and call the dreaming living, and call the decay death. Mingled with the sand of the Oak Street beach was the dust of men who had bathed in the lake ten thousand years before Eric the Red. And Cass McKay sat upon the sand, a skinny man in a blue bathrobe, reading True Romance.
“Y’all are shore one sweet kid,” he said to Norah Egan, fondling her hand. “Ah’ll bet y’all’d like some p’tato chips right now, wouldn’t yo’?” He came down hard on his southern accent, for he knew she had come to like its sound. He knew because she mocked it.
“Ah sho’ would,” she said, and they laughed together, two human things in the city.
“Let’s go down to the Chink place on Wentworth,” he offered, “an’ eat up all their chop suey.”
Thus passed one summer for two people, with card-games in the morning, sun-baths in the afternoon, and love-games at night.
One rainy morning in early September Norah went downstairs to do the day’s shopping; in the store on the corner she bought meat and butter and eggs, but when she opened her purse she lacked several cents of the sum necessary. She had to make an extra trip then, in order that they might have ham for breakfast. When she reentered Cass was squatting cross-legged on the floor with Lon Costello and Anthony Brown. They were playing threecard monte, and nickels and dimes littered the rug. The little Jew called “Stir-Nuts” was standing above them, looking down and giggling half to himself.
Norah paused in the doorway and crooked a finger to Cass. Without rising he reached in his pocket and rolled a half dollar toward her across the rug. Then, feigning laughter, he called carelessly, “That’s all there is, Blondie. There ain’t no more.”
And so, as soon as their supper on that night was done, Cass put on a yellow slicker and looked over to Norah; she was sitting on the edge of the bed, tugging away at high black galoshes.
He went to her, kneeled, and forced the boots over the little brown slippers; she ran her fingers through his hair as he knelt.
“How about the dishes, Lunky?” she teased, “You ain’t gonna leave ’em all dirty like that I hope.”
“Hell with the dish
es, hon. Mebbe Lon or Stir-Nuts’ll do ’em.” And they went.
Norah drove slower than usual that night, because of the rain. Despite the swift little wiper the windshield kept clouding up every few minutes.
“Goddamn,” Cass swore, “Looks jest like a second deluge.” He pronounced “deluge” “de-loog.”
“Ol’ floodgates jest opened an’ let down a deloog. Goddamn.”
“Coming down too hard to last very long.” Norah spoke curtly.
He tucked her collar in tightly about her throat. It was the second time they had used the car for this purpose; they were driving west on Lawrence past a cemetery which reminded Cass of the old French graveyard along Basin Street in New Orleans.
He had developed a habit of reading street-signs aloud; when the red traffic-lights stopped them on Damon he spoke abruptly into the windshield, peering narrow-eyed through the rain on the glass while he plucked at his scar.
“Hmmmmmmmmm. Save With Ice. Hmmmmmmmmm. Save With Ice.”
When the green light flashed, Norah flooded the engine; they lost twenty minutes under a gas-station shed then, waiting for the engine to dry out. She drove without speaking all the way into Cicero. There they parked three blocks south of the Western Electric plant, on the same street in which Cass had robbed a cabbie of forty-one dollars ten months before. It had been on that occasion that he had learned what an excellent street for his purposes it was: unlit save for gas lamps burning askew, and lined only by vacated cottages.
On the corner a blue and white Neon sign said “RUGS”—a drug store, with the “D” broken out. A slant rain blurred the sign a little now. This was their hoist.
Outstretched branches held leafless arms across their way as they walked toward the sign; drops flicked in their faces with every breath of the whispering wind. A bare-headed boy pulling a small wagon came down the street bawling to the blind windows, “Ice creeyum bars! Ice creeyum bars an’ popsickuls!” About them the slant rain ceased, and the wind became more like a faint passing murmur than a wind.
Cass walked by the place first, his head in his collar and his collar turned up. Norah waited five minutes, then walked past more slowly, pausing a moment in front of the rows of cheap magazines displayed in the window. She raised her eyes but one second, then passed swiftly on: in that second she impressed on her brain the store’s interior almost to its last detail. Her eye for detail was keener than Cass’s. It took him ten seconds to observe what she could see in the wink of an eye.
“If we have to go different directions,” he said as they met on the corner, “hide out somewheres on Clark till Wednesday, then come up to the hotel in the afternoon. If it ain’t safe by Wednesday get word to Regan where yore stayin’—Ah’ll pick it up from Regan; he’s the night clerk now.”
Before entering they held a final consultation: the tall one was the owner—the Jew with the mustache and hornrimmed glasses.
“Ah’ll take him,” Cass said, “on account ah don’t like Jews.”
The boy at the fountain didn’t look much like trouble, Norah would take him and then fish out the till. If a customer or a cop walked in that would be Cass’s work. Norah would come in after him and leave first; he’d give her a minute to get to the wheel.
Cass waited at a newsstand across the street until he saw that the store was deserted of customers; then he recrossed and sat at a white-tiled table with his scar turned toward the unseeing wall. When the fountain clerk brought him water he ordered a malted milk.
“An’ put in a choklut floater,” he added.
The container was purring about on the mixer when Norah drove up. Cass could hear the car’s motor running when she opened the door, and the sound seemed as soft as that of the container on the mixer.
“A lemon coke,” Norah said, and she said it casually. Cass rose from the table and sauntered slowly toward the rear; he felt that Norah had timed herself well. He saw her fumbling about in her purse as though for her change, heard the mixer humming smoothly, heard the wind rising outside.
When Cass got back of the prescription counter Norah pulled her Colt from her purse and spoke steadily. “This is a stick-up.” She heard Cass’s voice, strangely hard and ringing behind glass as she covered the fountain-boy. She heard a door close, and a key turn, and she forced the boy farther back, placing herself against the till. The boy kept making frightened white faces in front of her; his mouth kept jerking his underlip sidewise. “We won’t hurt you, son,” she assured him, fearing that he might decide to scream. She saw that his face was thickly pimpled, and added, “I’ll bet you eat lots of sundaes on the Jew boss, don’t you?” The boy stopped making faces then and merely stared stupidly. She heard Cass’s voice, coming nearer, and caught the flash of his yellow slicker.
“A cinch, Blondie! A cinch!”
She sensed his exultation, knew that he must have the druggist locked in the lavatory.
As he brushed past her she saw the side of his face that bore his scar. In that hasty moment it looked to Norah like a loose and grayish ribbon hanging out of the corner of his mouth. The light made it look like that, so gray-like and loose.
“A cinch, Blondie! A cinch!”
He covered the fountain boy in her place, and tried to joke with the boy to calm him. Norah banged open the till, and Cass caught the glint of silver beneath the light. He saw sweat standing on Norah’s forehead under her little gray hat; a dime rolled across the floor at his feet. She was scooping bills into her purse, the malted milk was slopping furiously all over the mixer; outside the rain was beginning again. Cass heard it tap against the windows, and he smelled the drink on the mixer. Norah zipped her purse shut, slid around the edge of the counter, and was through the door. Through the fountain-mirror Cass saw her go; then he leaned leisurely across the counter, the .45 flat beneath his palm on a cold marble surface. He would drink a mouthful of that chocolate malted before he left. That would impress Norah. He was Bad-Hat McKay, and he took his time, and he treated his woman right.
“Git that offn the mixer!” he roared. “Pour it! Quick!” He saw the boy’s fingers fumbling for the button, saw them find it at last. The boy slopped half the milk out of the container, and a long shadow passed the side-window. The milk was spilling over the glass’s edge, the Jew in the lavatory kicked the wall.
“Ah said quick!” he repeated—and the boy dropped both glass and container; Cass heard the glass break, saw the boy begin trembling with fright.
He said, “Don’t holler,” and looked in the mirror when he said it. He saw the door behind him begin opening, and he thought that that door would never get quite open. Then the mirror fogged and blurred, as though wet with steam or dew. A plain-clothes bull with his rod in his hand, and behind him a glass door closing slowly.
In that split fraction between decision and action Cass saw, reelingly reflected through mirror and door, the figure of Norah stepping into the car; he heard the purring of the motor, and knew that she wasn’t going to wait. Then her figure was gone, and the motor was gone, and a red taillight winked slyly through darkness and rain.
Cass could not have turned when the door opened behind him; he could not have whirled, firing, and so have fought his way out. Cass had not the courage, not an ounce of such courage. He did not dare now to move even one small finger. And then fear took him so that he felt all his innards sagging and cringing; a weak urine ran down his leg, leaving him sick and strengthless. The gun in his hand slid off the cold marble surface with a small silver tinkling, down into a sink with a half-sunken cocacola glass, and one soapy cup, and a long-handled sundae spoon.
In that moment Cass thought of two white-girl hands, cupping peanuts in their palms. He counted, slowly, up to four. And hands took him from behind.
14
When a man starts suddenly out of sleep to find himself lying atop cold iron on the upper bunk of a windowless cell, he is stunned for a moment. For one long moment he doesn’t know where he lies. Then he touches a ceiling just by lifti
ng an arm or hears the stirring of another in the darkness beneath, or hears the tread of the tier-guard far down the tier—he remembers then so that his heart pains, beating faster.
Yet even when everything comes clear once more—the long ride with the siren wailing—what the young lawyer said to the hard-eyed jury, what the old judge said to the young lawyer—even then a man must wonder, not quite understanding. Remembering boyhood, early yearning, love and hope and pain, he cannot wholly understand what has brought him to this place.
Cook County jailhouse, say you’re there. One to fourteen for robbery with a gun. First-offense, white, male, native-born. Say that’s what you are, say that’s what you’re serving. Being first-offense, native-born white like that helps a little. It can even keep you from getting ten to fourteen. All the same, even one year is a hell of a stretch, even where ten months of good conduct equal twelve. After you stare through an opening in a blue-steel door for a week, ten years and ten months mean about the same thing. Before a month is out you feel that you’ve done a year. Not only heart-hurt and hurt all the time: hurt because you’re cold, hurt because your bunk is crumby, hurt because you’re worried over some woman outside. And you’re hungry. Say for ten months, every night, you lie down hungry. In the middle of the night you wake up—and you’re hungry. Hunger is a dry hand, say, squeezing on your gut. And there’s nothing you can do but think, “Tomorrow morning at ten I’ll get oatmeal to eat.” No use standing up, no use whimpering, no use cursing your cell-mate or walking up and down; no use bawling out through the bars, “I’m hungry, Guard, I can’t steep I’m so hungry.” Guard doesn’t care much. So you lie still and take it. You take it until it seems there are two on your bunk: yourself, and your hunger.
Somebody in Boots Page 27