Then come faces of men you have hated, men you have fought, men you have tricked; memories of faces that will not let you be, but come in throngs in the night in the dark, in the cold. Faces of men, faces of women, faces of children and strangers and friends. (Beautiful rough-hewn faces of men, sweet-mouthed level-eyed faces of women.) The faces of friends hurt more than faces you hate, if you miss them more than you hate the others; but if you have no friend, and hate some one face pretty much, then that hurt is even worse than the other.
And when you can’t sleep you try to forget whatever pain it is that hurts most, hunger or love. Think about somehing else, remember something funny. Some joke you heard or some place you saw or something you did, or some job that you pulled. Remember all the places you’ve been: Cincinnati, Seattle, Niagara Falls; remember how the colored spray looked from the Canadian side, all green and yellow and red like that under the colored floodlights? Only you can’t remember clearly because your belly is flat as a washboard and twice as cold, and you’re thinking that if it hadn’t been for one piece of bad luck you wouldn’t be in here at all.
Cass tried to remember places: Harrisburg and Joplin and East Texas. But when he got around to thinking of Oklahoma City he recalled an afternoon when he’d been sitting on the courthouse steps in Pawhuska up in the Osage country, when one of those little brown Osage girls had come past. She had walked slowly, yet lightly. So it was no use, it all came back to Norah. Night and day, Norah Egan.
“She cain’t come to visit, on account of they’d snatch her,” he consoled himself daily. “She could write me a letter, but it seem like she don’t. If she goes broke she can sell the car, but she won’t get half what it’s worth.”
And night and day a dull pain filled his heart, a pain which seemed daily to draw him back into darkness. Into the back of his head came again the old feeling of being, somehow, clogged; he felt the old numbing darkness coming back, and he was helpless, in this place, to fight it. With Norah not near he was helpless in most things. He felt that he was losing a part of himself, some vital part. And his mind, as though swathed with many dark bandages, would admit few memories but memories of Norah; would permit few thoughts to escape that were of her. Sometimes, surreptitiousiy, some reminiscence of Nancy, of Bryan, or of his father would creep in, crawl weakly about for a minute or two—and then he would recall Norah in a yellow dress or how she had looked when asleep . . . Night and day, day and night, in an endless river of memory. . . . Norah had leaped a tiny stream flowing between two great white rocks, she had jumped lightly across, in a yellow dress. She had had a peculiar way of jumping, just as she’d had her own way of speaking, of laughing, of singing, of dancing and thinking and smiling. She had never said, “Good morning” to him, but always, mocking, “How you-all this mo’nin’, suh?”
Cass, remembering small things Norah had said, words he had disregarded once, now remembered them all, each one, with a pain that racked him like a skewer turning in his bowels. Seeking release from his memories he often went to the opening in his door to try to talk to the tier-guard or a passing trusty.
“Ugh-hugh,” the trusty would say. “Yep, I guess you’re right about that, sonny”—and would keep on walking by. Then Cass would try to talk to his cell-mate, or to the prisoner across the corridor.
Day and night merged together slowly, until there ceased to be days that were different from night. The men slept. Each morning at four they heard the tier-guards change. Bootsteps coming up, bootsteps going down. Men here hardly knew the night from the day save by bootsteps going down. They rose, they walked, they spoke low words; they hardly knew that the night had ceased.
Twice each day two prison cooks and a kitchen-guard came up the tier rolling a little white two-wheeled wagon before them that resembled a street-cleaner’s wagon. Before each cell they left a ladleful of slop in the opening. Usually it was cold slop. Sometimes there was bread in it.
For an hour every afternoon the men were let into the bull-pen for exercise. They paced up and down swinging their arms, or stood staring at each other without speech. There were some who had been in the jail for so long that when their doors were opened for their hour of freedom they would not move from where they lay. Cass came to understand such men more and more. More and more, as time passed, he would have to force himself to take advantage of the bull-pen hour. Before his term was up he would be as these others.
After the bull-pen hour had passed the great door would slam behind him, and a blue-steel rod would shoot across the top of his cell, double-locking his door. The rod was operated by the tier-guard, with a single motion double-locking every cell on the tier. Cass became used to its sound, came eventually to await it; before the end its sound would give him peace. For an hour after hearing it, its slamming would, somehow, solve everything; its finality leave no room for doubt. He would forget then, and sleep for a while.
Sometimes the men heard voices come up from the brickyard far below; they bent their heads to the wall, listening. Each man stood next to his own gray wall, each stood in gray sack-cloth, listening. Sometimes confused human cries came up through the walls into darkness.
Cass’s cell-mate was a half-demented weasel who was serving six months for a crime against nature. It was his constant boast that, through abundant virility, he had for many years earned a living as a male prostitute. His speech consisted solely of this boast, until Cass wearied of hearing. When the man’s term was up, in Cass’s third week, Cass was heartily glad to see him go; even though it left him alone in the cell. For two months Cass was alone, and his only conversation of those months was with an Irishman confined across the corridor. Cass could see into this cell, and all that the two men in it did. Of the two he seldom saw more than the one, however, because one lay all day with his face turned toward the wall, coughing regularly. The odor of a sick sweat on his body at times pervaded the entire tier. The sick one’s cell-mate was a hairy devil named Conlay Costigan; with the sick man Conlay waged unceasing warfare. He harangued him for hours every day, upbraiding him for his illness. Cass wondered why the head jailer did not have the two separated. Costigan never let the tier-guard go past without calling through the opening of his door, “Cleary! Hey, Cleary, ye pitiful ould louse. Misther Cleary then Sor!—An’ would ye be so good as to say one word now to Jayler to get me out o’ this pin wid this sick boor layin’ here? Would ye now, Misther Cleary plaze Sor? The man smells verra fould indade Sor . . .”
But Cleary would pass on, for he had heard the same plea a thousand times; and Costigan would peer over at Cass.
“Jay-ler thinks me an’ Billy Moore should be in thogether, being as we’re cousins, in for the same rap. But that’s just the jayler’s opinion, lad; between Billy an’ me is now no love whatsoever. An do ye not think I’ve a right to my health, lad? Must I get ill with yellow glanders p’raps, just ’cause Billy here did not care for his self in his yout’? Lord only knows what Billy has got.”
Cass once called out to the tier-guard, “Put number forty in with me, Cleary.” The old guard looked over his shoulder at Cass’s eyes in the opening.
“Don’t worrry about that hairy ape, sonny,” he advised. “He wouldn’t get sick if you shot him. An’ anyhow that T. B. is goin’ to the hospital tomorrow. Had it straight from the chief this mornin’.”
But the morrow and a week of tomorrows came and went, and no one came to take Moore away.
Cass scratched a huge heart on his wall, plunged an arrow through its center, and wrote Norah’s name beside his own above the arrow. It took him a full morning, using the edge of his spoon, to make the heart; and in the afternoon, after the bull-pen hour, he added bleeding drops beneath the arrow and its wound.
On a night in Cass’s fourteenth week, a prisoner went mad. The hour was late, between twelve and one, and most of the men had been sleeping for hours. The fellow wedged his head into the opening of his door and began screaming nonsense into the corridor, like a rooster cackling upon catching
his head in the wire netting of a butcher’s coop. “Friends!” he called, and the voice was an old man’s voice, “Friends! Wake up quickly and see what I’m doing! Pick-a-lee! Call everyone now to come look at me quickly. Peter! You Petey! You rascal! You thief! My son is a thief, he steals, then he lies. Come here once, you devil, and I’ll trounce you good. Good friends, kind people—say where is poor Peter? Come look at poor Petey, he steals and he lies and his nose is all snot again. Pick-a-lee! I say, pick-a-lee! There is no bread any more, good people, that bread was all eaten long ago. Pick-a-lee, you Peter! Picka-lee you Pete! Pick-a-lee! Pick-a-lee! Pick-a-lee!”
Cass saw the shadow then, grotesque as a baboon’s shadow. Someone on the north end of the cell-block began cursing the racket, and across the corridor Conlay Costigan added his curses.
Then a whisper, awed and terrible, went up and down the whole corridor.
“The crazy-house—they’re takin’ him to the crazy-house. It’s twice as big as this an’ it’s way out west in Dunnin’.”
The jailers had to saw a bar off the door before they could free the mad fellow’s head to take him away. Cass did not sleep the rest of that night for thinking of his father.
He lay awake on his bunk, and all old faces, all familiar eyes and figures returned. The giant figure of Sheriff Lem Shultz striding down Nevada Street in the sun, waving a greeting to all he saw; the strange dark man named Benjamin Cody staring down into a fire and praying as he stared; the eyes of the Mexican girl Pepita; and the smoldering eyes of his sister.
“Ah shouldn’t of spoke so to sister that time,” Cass thought.
There was no desire in Cass to return. It was Norah Egan he wanted now. Where she was was peace, and home, and all things that meant well to him.
“Mebbe she writ a note an’ they don’t want ah should have it,” he thought. Yet he knew that even in a note she would be unable to say even so much as, “I sold the car,” far less to speak of where she was or of what she was doing. Weekly, he feared being taken to the Thursday night show-up at Eleventh and State.
“She’ll leave word with Regan, where she’s hidin’ out,” he told himself.
He remembered how his life had been before he’d met her. He counted the times he’d been beaten or mocked, how often he’d gone hungry or cold. It seemed all his life before that meeting he had gone hungry and loveless and cold. He had been sick in an open boxcar once; no one had come near to help. It had never mattered, any time, until he met Norah. He had fought then to keep what she had given him. He had put down fear, that he might have her love. He had fought hard as he had been able, in the only manner that life had taught him. Life had taught him that there were no rules: everything went, fair or foul, below the belt or an inch above it: if you wished to live, to feel that you too were a man no different than other men, then you packed a heat on your hip and you got what you could. If you didn’t take chances, then you lived in a flop. You begged, you whined, you averted your eyes. You were always half-hungry. You went without love.
Because she was all things to him Cass felt now, lying face downward on cold blue steel, because she was his, he would continue to fight when he was released. The girl was his, she was all life had given him; and he would not now let her go.
His, Cass McKay’s. And never anyone else’s.
And the life of the jail flowed on, in a slow muddy stream. Cass reckoned the interminable days by a calendar drawn on the wall: he watched the morning hours crawl across his cell on a shaft of gray light filtering in from somewhere high above, to trickle imperceptibly across the floor all afternoon, finally to worm out beneath the steel door in the evening. Then he made a cross on his calendar, for another day had passed. Sometimes he had a cellmate for a day or a week, and sometimes weeks went by without one.
In his third month, when 1932 had become 1933, he reached his twenty-second birthday. He called to Costigan across the way, “Today ah’m twenty-two!” but the surly fellow made no answer. Cass called out to the tier-guard, “Know what day t’day is, Cleary?” But Cleary kept right on walking.
In the middle of January Cass had a cell-mate for three days. A husky young Pole was shoved in one afternoon while Cass was lying half-asleep on the lower bunk. Cass wakened with a start when he heard Cleary’s voice.
“Here’s comp’ny for you, Red.”
Cass sat up blinking and said, “Hello.” For reply the other flicked his tie across the spoon-holder in the manner of one well used to jails, spat against the far wall, and swore softly to himself. Then he sat down on the bunk, shoving Cass’s legs against the wall to give himself room.
“You sleep upstairs, kid,” he said while unlacing his shoes, “Get up there now. I got to sleep.”
Cass made no move.
“Say, fella, you unnerstan’ English? Where you from?”
Cass elevated himself, slowly and ominously, upon one elbow.
“Mah name is Bad-Hat McKay”—letting each word fall like a ten-pound weight on the other’s ears—“An’ ah come from the Big Bend Country. Some folks call me Two-Gun, an’ some just says Bad-Hat.”
But the other did not appear even faintly interested now. Cass leaned on his elbow, waiting, until his whole side ached with the effort. Then he lay down once more and returned his feet halfway to their original position. The Pole spoke sharply then, “Whyn’t you stay down in the Big Bend? How do I know I won’t catch syph from livin’ in here with you? What you doin’ up North anyhow? God, you don’t look like you got good sense.” He shoved Cass’s feet back to make more room for his buttocks. Cass remained supine. The fellow rolled a cigarette and returned the tobacco to his pocket without offering it to Cass.
“I asked you once now—what you doin’ North? I don’t want to have to ask you twice.”
“Ah come up lookin’ fo’ work is all.”
“Kind o’ work?” His tone was now that of an employer interviewing a prospective employee. Cass thought hurriedly.
“Show-business work,” he answered, and was surprised to hear himself say it. “Ah make all the burleykyoo houses North an’ South.” He was bewildered to find himself on the defensive, he wondered whether Costigan across the way was listening.
“Don’t lie, kid, you ain’t never had a job nowheres, not all your life you ain’t. I think I’ll start callin’ you Jizz-Lips on account your mouth is so big. That’s we call a big-mouth kid in my neighborhood—Jizz-Lips. Say, if you come from Texas like you say you do, then answer me somethin’ quick. If you don’t answer quick, then I’ll know you’re just lyin’. Why is times so hard down there that you had to come way up here lookin’ for work? Don’t you know there ain’t no jobs up here for punk kids?”
Cass thought it wise to reply.
“Spiks got all our jobs down there. Ain’t no work left for a white man in the Big Bend country.”
It was the explanation which Cass had heard most often. The other reflected for a moment, then spoke gravely.
“Well, they ain’t no spiks in my neighborhood. There never was that I remember. But we always had hard times. We never had enough to eat. I never had a square meal till I started coppin’ bikes with the boys. How you figger that one out, wise-guy?”
His tone this time was one of propounding a riddle; the solution came easily to Cass.
“Niggers then. Niggers is why. In Texas it’s Mexes an’ up here it’s shokes. Say, didn’t ah see twenty nigger cops out in Englewood? Didn’t ah see twenty dinges with mailbags draggin’ letters all over the derned post-office one day?”
Cass was a little proud of this explanation, until the Pole flared up at him. He leaned far over the bunk and shook a warning finger within an inch of Cass’s nose.
“Say, Jizz-Lips, Englewood is my neighborhood—an’ nobody ever seen a nigger cop in my neighborhood. You’re just lyin’ again is all.” He waggled the finger to emphasize his challenge, “An’ you didn’t see no nigger mailman carryin’ any letter of mine around, I’ll tell you that to your nasty pecke
rface.”
Cass said, “Cleary’ll get after you, you talkin’ like that to me.” Then, placatingly he added, “Mebbe it wasn’t in Englewood I seen ’em.”
Cass had the uneasy feeling then that Englewood was no more the Pole’s community than it was his own.
“You ought to be more careful what you say, Jack Ugly,” the Pole warned, “cause I got one terrible temper. You’ll just have to be watchin’ yourself night an’ day while I’m in here now, if you’re figgerin’ on gettin’ out alive. Lucky for you I’m not in long. I’m on my way to Joliet. You sleep upstairs as long as I stay.”
Cass felt that this fellow was gaining the upper hand much too easily. Evidently the fellow didn’t quite realize how tough Cassy McKay really was. In an effort to retrieve his waning prestige, Cass patronized.
“Well, fella, ah don’t know as ah blame y’all fo’ gettin’ all blowed up—reck’n ah’d get sore too if some ’un said ah lived in niggertown. Yeah, ah hates ’em perty bad mahself. Fact is ah don’t s’pose there is many folks hates ’em quite so bad as me.”
The other disputed the point.
“No, ain’t nobody hates ’em like you ’cep’ me. I hates ’em worse’n you or anybody else. Now get upstairs.”
Cass wondered where Nubby O’Neill was. He climbed onto the upper bunk without protest, and lay down. He lay down slowly, so as not to raise dust out of the moldy blanket. He wished to sleep, but the other continued to plague him with questions.
“You got a girl, fella?”
Cass answered with pride. “O’ course. Ain’t you?”
The other would not commit himself, seeming more interested in Cass now than in himself.
“What’s her name?” he asked.
“Norah.”
Immediately the Pole feigned an elaborate astonishment. “Norah—Norah did you say? No kiddin’, kid? Is Norah really her name? Why say, you know I used to own a yeller hound name of Norah—an’ that bitch didn’t even have a tail! Can y’imagine such a thing happenin’ right in here the first day I come in?”
Somebody in Boots Page 28