A Pair of Boots & Two Sacks of Clothes

There's a pair of cowboy boots sitting in the window of a shop downtown. The heels and the toe are a little scuffed and I wonder who they belonged to. The label says $89 and I decide to go in and try them on. Who knows?

The store's owner, Jacob, says of course I can try them on. They're a real bargain — hardly worn. He reaches for them from the window and I sit down in an old armchair to pull them on.

The door jangles and a large, nervous-looking man squeezes in with two old sacks of clothes.

"I'm sorry," says Jacob. "But we're not really in a position to be buying any more stock right now."

The man puts down the sacks and takes off his hat. "I thought you might just like to take a look," he explains, and I think I hear his voice crack. "They were my wife's clothes."

Jacob is not the kind of guy who turns away a man whose voice is cracking while he's walking around town carrying two sacks of his dead wife's clothes. He says well, let's have a look and see what you've got there, sir, and I leave them to it and walk up and down the shop floor. The boots fit, and I'm beginning to look better. Do I really need another pair of shoes to make myself feel tougher? I have limited funds and I was hoping to get on the road — maybe through the desert as far as Nevada. I think about the case full of dollars. How much is left? I don't know.

Jacob and the man go through the sacks of dresses. They don't look like much, and I think that this must be the difference between vintage and just plain old. But Jacob is gentle: he says hey, look at this one, and this one, and this one here is beautiful. Yeah, Jacob is a good guy, maybe he'll write out some kind of a cheque after all.

I can't watch and I don't feel I should be here anymore. So I quietly put the boots back in the window, sneak out of the store, and close the door. When I get back to the house I pull the case out from under the bed and count out the dollars. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty... There's $860 left. It's enough: enough for boots and the next two months and enough to get to Nevada through the desert, I'm sure.

But when I get back to the store the next morning, the boots aren't there anymore.