A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  He sat down at his desk, and drawing the thick book toward him, he leafed through it to DAVIS to find several listings for JULIA. Taking them in order, he lifted the telephone-receiver and gave the first number to the operator—and then, before the connection could be made [What would you say, you thought, and to whom, to what Julia, would you be saying it? how many calls would you have to make before making the right one, how many more than several, and to what boroughs, to what cities, to what foreign countries? and was the name still DAVIS, or had it become DAVISON, DAVIES, DAVENPORT, or FITZGERALD? but always, what would you say, what would you say and why?], he hung up.

  YOU GETS NO BREAD WITH ONE MEAT BALL

  “Last name?”

  “Ritchie.”

  “First name?”

  “Fred.”

  “Frederick?”

  “No, just Fred.”

  [When news of the war came to Clarks, Nebraska, Fred asked his father for leave to join up with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and help the starved Cubans against the cruel Spaniards. But his father, a dirt-farmer with half a section under mortgage, owned outright a small collection of books, among them one by a crank named Henry George, and he told Fred that no Ritchie was going off to get killed in the jungle for any son-of-a-bitch of a Wall Street sugar-millionaire—and besides, the father pointed out, Fred was only twelve years old, and it was doubtful that a big man like Teddy Roosevelt would be able to see that far down toward the ground. Fred kept on nagging, though, saying that every army, even the army of a big man like Teddy Roosevelt, needed drummer-boys, and that without such, it would have to fight standing still, and it would be butchered. The fact is, Fred had never played any musical instrument outside of a comb wrapped in a corn-leaf but that didn’t stop him from following his father around day after day and begging to be allowed to punish the cruel Spaniards that starved the Cubans, and finally the man, running out of arguments, treated the boy to a good set of clouts and walked off to let them sink in. They sank in.]

  “…Trouble with me is, I’m hungry,” Fred said. “I’m always hungry. I been hungry all m’ life….”

  [That same night, Fred packed a supply of corn-leaves in a bandana and ran away in the direction of Tampa. It took him two weeks to make it {without the comb, which he’d forgotten), and by that time, Teddy Roosevelt had gone and won the war all by himself, braving certain death from the dumdum bullets that the cruel Spaniards fired from their smokeless Mausers, and setting the starved Cubans free to work for the God-fearing sugar-millionaires of Wall Street. He’d become a bigger man than ever, Teddy had, and for his noble deeds at San Juan Hill, they wined him and dined him all over the United States, and it was hard for him to go anywhere without falling over something to eat and something to wash it down with. But nobody pressed any food or drink on Fred Ritchie around about Tampa, not even at the Poor Farm, where he was shipped when the police caught up with him. He spent three years at the Farm, and if he learned little else there, he found out the meaning of the expression, “My belly thinks my throat’s been cut.”]

  “… Give some people a square meal,” Fred said, “and they lose their appetite. With me, it only gets worse. They forget how hungry they was before, but a meal being only a meal, I keep on hungry even after I’m full. I never seen the time I wasn’t hungry….”

  [When somebody passed the word that victuals were piled face-high in the Carolinas for anyone calling himself a cigarette-maker, Fred pointed his nose at the North Star, and at Winston-Salem, all his dreams came true. He got a job rolling cigarettes with one hand and spearing company-grub with the other, and eating two dozen eggs at a sitting and rolling two thousand smokes in a ten-hour day, he was a happy young man. Along about the time he was seventeen, though, the company got wind of a machine that’d roll four hundred cigarettes to a man’s one, but the real beauty of it was that you didn’t have to feed it eggs to make it go, only paper and tobacco, so they went out and bought ten of those machines and fired four thousand rollers, among them Fred Ritchie.]

  “… Being hungry’s a sickness with me,” Fred said, “and sooner or later it’s going to kill me. No matter how much I eat in my lifetime, I’ll die hungry….”

  [The news went around that they were still rolling cigarettes by hand at a place called Richmond, but what the rumor left out was that you had to buy your own eggs there, and also that if you couldn’t roll three thousand pieces a day, you could go die. Fred managed to roll three thousand, all right, but he had to hump fourteen hours to do it, and to little purpose, because by the time he got through eating each week, he was always short of cash for his landlady, and it got so he was changing his lodgings just about every time the rent fell due. A stop was put to all that by the Richmond cigarette-companies: they heard about the machines.]

  “… Some people eat fast,” Fred said, “which shows they’re only eating so’s they can get back to work. I hurry m’work so’s I can get back to eating. It’s the eating that’s the big thing in this life….”

  [At the age of twenty-one, after knocking about from job to job (meaning meal to meal) for a couple of years, Fred found that there were no more jobs to be had (meaning no more meals), so in ’07 he enlisted in the United States Army. For ten years, the Government fed him three times a day in return for only one little expedition to teach a lesson to some cruel Mexicans who were shooting Wall Street mining-millionaires. Somebody put a bug in Fred’s ear about the Mexicans not really being such bandits, but Fred kept on killing them till he heard that all they were after was enough to eat, and from then on, he fired his rifle straight up in the air.]

  “… I don’t suppose I ever made a move in m’ life,” Fred said, “except it was connected with food.”

  [Another war came along in ’17, the one that we got into account of the cruel Germans raping all those Belgian nuns. Fred, though, he fought it for a different reason altogether: he couldn’t get over the Germans sinking all those ships loaded with cutlets, and the more he thought about it, the sorer he got, and when they turned him loose in France, he made a point of firing his Springfield directly at the enemy, and there were four—five times when he lost control of himself and did some mighty crazy things to get in an extra shot. As a result, quite a few less Germans were alive when the war ended, and Fred owned a fancy assortment of medals, and if he never got to he President, like Teddy Roosevelt, he did get to he master-sergeant, and that’s the job he was holding down when some pip-squeak of a captain handed him his Honorable Discharge after twenty-odd years of service, thanked him for his patriotism, and told him where to turn in his equipment.]

  “…That was some weeks back,” Fred said, “long enough for me to find out that my pension don’t even start to cover my eating. I’m hungry. I’m hungry all the time.”

  FOURTH OF JULY WEEK-END

  The top deck of the Jersey Central steamer Monmouth was crowded, but Dan found a space for his camp-chair forward of the wheelhouse, and leaning against the port rail, he looked off over the Cedar Street dock at the punctured palisade of Manhattan—and then a bell sounded, and the engines were engaged, and the island began to slide astern, and soon the Monmouth was running down the long roadstead of the Upper Bay at twenty knots. Outside the channel lay anchored tramps and colliers, and among them car-ferries steamed, and rope-bearded tugs made their way with dead-weight scows. Below Quarantine, in the Narrows, a man waved from the parapet of Fort Wadsworth and was gone, and entering the Lower Bay, the Monmouth rolled a little on a groundswell, and bell-buoys jigged and chimed, and then Jersey showed its tongue, the Hook, and from its tip a twelve-inch naval rifle took two pot-shots at the horizon—and then there was smooth shallow water to the Highlands. Boat-trains were waiting on the pier, and Dan climbed into the scowling open end of a local and rode five waterside miles before the conductor opened the door to say, “Searight! Sebright!”

  He saw Mary on the platform a few car-lengths ahead, and he used the time it took him to reach her to quell a dis
turbance in his throat; he put it down only to the extent that he was able to make himself say nothing when they were standing face to face. She said, “You told me you’d come, and you did, and I’m glad, Dan,” but he was still afraid to speak, and he did not reply, and when the train drew out, they crossed the tracks and walked in silence toward the bathing-pavilion.

  At the office, a lifeguard placed a key on a stack of towels and slid them to the edge of the counter, saying, “How you been, Mary?”

  “Just fine, Steve,” she said. “Steve White, Dan Johnson.”

  “Glad to know you,” Dan said.

  “Likewise,” Steve said. “See you maybe on the beach.”

  Their locker was in the last aisle of bath-houses, and Mary entered, propped up the window-flap, and stood looking out over the beach at the sea. “I’m sorry we’re in this row,” she said. “It was right along here somewhere, Dan—this locker or the next. I’m sorry.”

  “It makes no difference,” he said.

  “It has to make a difference. You wouldn’t be human otherwise.”

  “I’m human, all right, and maybe that’s why I don’t care. You say, ‘right along here,’ but nothing happened right along here that wouldn’t’ve happened elsewhere. A thing like that doesn’t spoil the place. If it did, the whole earth’d be spoiled.”

  “You speak as if you really believed that.”

  “I’ve put in six months of my life trying to believe it enough to say it.”

  “Was it so very hard to do?” she said.

  “Hard as hell. I told you I was human, didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t have to be told, Dan. I knew it.”

  “The spoiled thing, if there was a spoiled thing, wasn’t some God damn bath-house floor: it was you. The floor’s the same. Nothing ever happens to a floor. What I had to make up my mind about was whether anything had happened to you.”

  “It has, Dan.”

  “Maybe, but it’s nothing I care a hang about.”

  “I know better.”

  “You don’t even know where you live.” “You say nothing happens to a floor. What you mean is, nothing you can’t scrub off. But people aren’t floors.”

  “To hell with being first,” he said. “I wasn’t first in Colorado, and I wasn’t twenty-first. to hell with it, Mary.”

  “It isn’t just a matter of numbers, first or twenty-first or whatever,” she said. “It’s what you have left for the next.”

  “No matter what you have, it’s at least as much as I brought back from Colorado,” he said. “I have more now, and so will you some day, and if I have to wait ten years for us to be even, I’ll wait, and I’ll do my waiting as near as you can stand me.” He put his face to hers, and together they looked through the foot-square window at a yellow dory surging on the unbroken water beyond the combers. “If only the Indians had been the navigators!” he said. “They’d’ve stood on the sand at Palos, saying, ‘We claim the Old World in the name of the Plumed Serpent, the Great Snake, and the Grand Manitou, and it belongs to Crazy Horse the Lakota, and may evil Okies dwell in all infidels who worship Jesus!’ But let’s you and I go, sweetheart. Let’s swim to Spain.”

  “Please don’t call me that, Dan.”

  “Let’s swim, then, but not toward Spain.”

  “Couldn’t we go some other time?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’ll still be there.” She turned away from him and began to unbutton her dress. “Don’t you want me to go outside?”

  “Not if you want to stay.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to do what pleases you.”

  “May I watch if I stay?”

  “If you wish. I won’t ask.”

  “Would you watch me?”

  “I can’t, Dan.”

  “Will you ever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have I got a chance?”

  “You’ve got a good chance.”

  “But right now, nothing more than that?”

  “It’s more than nothing, Dan.”

  “What would I have to do to have all?”

  “Not a thing. There’s only something I have to do, and when I do it, you’ll know. You’ll be the first to know.”

  “Let’s start for Spain. We’ll swim slowly.”

  Out beyond the last rope, beyond the yellow buoy and the yellow dory, they rode broad corrugations running inshore to break. “Did you watch me, Dan?” Mary said.

  “Quiet,” he said. “I hear Spanish music.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, of course.”

  “A malagueña, or something. Flora’d know.”

  “But all the same, I’m curious.”

  “Would you be angry if I’d watched?”

  “I’d have no right to be.”

  “Would you be hurt if I hadn’t?”

  “I just want to know.”

  “Which would you rather? You’ve got to say.”

  “I’d rather you watched.”

  “One more question. Do you think I did, or not?”

  “Not,” she said.

  He laughed. “You must think I’m crazy,” he said. Later, lying on the sand side by side and face-down, they were the hinged halves of a whole, like an open locket, and he said, “No one could say you were beautiful.”

  “No one has to.”

  “Your teeth are perfect. I’ve never seen such teeth.” “They won’t last forever.”

  “And you have the smallest feet and the smallest hands.” “I’m very vain about my feet.”

  “But that’s as far as I can go. It’d be impossible to say you’re beautiful.”

  “I’m all the time buying shoes.”

  “I look at you, and I say to myself, ‘She’s quite plain. I like pretty girls, but this one isn’t pretty at all.’ And then I look again, and I wonder, because you aren’t plain any more, and I say, ‘Why did I think she was plain before? She’s beautiful.’”

  “Which am I now?”

  “Plain. You’ve been plain for quite a while.”

  “Maybe I’ll be beautiful soon.”

  “Maybe, but for the time being, you’re plain. Don’t worry, though: I like you plain.”

  “I thought you liked pretty girls.”

  “Before meeting you, that was. Now I’m for your kind, and I’ll tell you why. No one’s always beautiful, and no one’s always plain: a beautiful girl has moments of plainness, just as a plain girl has moments of beauty. I prefer the plain one. I think it’s exciting to watch her change.”

  “But wouldn’t it be better to watch the other? You’d be watching something beautiful, and when the plain moment came, you could turn away till it was over.”

  “The plain moment would spoil all the others. I’d know it was coming, but I’d never know when, and I’d be so busy getting ready to avoid it that I couldn’t take pleasure in the beauty. But with a plain girl, like you, I’d be waiting for the moment that plainness ended, and so far from trying to avoid it, I’d be scared to death of missing it, and I’d look and look, and somehow the very plainness would become the beauty.”

  “All the same, I wish I was beautiful.”

  “Right now, you are, Mary.”

  They swam again, this time so far out that they were whistled in by the guard in the dory, and then they walked far over the jetty-broken beach, picking up shells, shying stones, wading through sloughs of stranded water, talking and not talking, and now and then pausing to embrace and to stand for minutes merely looking at each other or together looking at nothing—and the simple history of the walk was written for quick erasure by the tide—and then once more they were in the bath-house, with sweet shower-water running from their suits to make flippers of their feet on the absorbent floor.

  “Are you going to face away again?” he said.

  “I still have to, Dan.”

  “I still have to watch you.”

  “I still want you to.”

  “You’re not plain now, y
ou know.”

  “If I’m beautiful, the change was made by you.”

  “You understand why that is, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

  When they passed the office, Dan put the key on the counter, saying, “I thought you were going to join us on the beach, Steve.”

  “I started to once,” Steve said, “but I took a good look and changed my mind.”

  “Well, anyway, thanks for starting to.”

  “You mean, for changing my mind,” Steve said. “Bring him around again, Mary. He can swim in our ocean.”

  “Would tomorrow be too soon?” she said.

  “I think I could stand a New Yorker two days in a row. This New Yorker.”

  Outside the pavilion, Dan looked at the darkening sky over the Shrewsbury, and he said, “Green. You don’t often see green in the sky. Jesus, if we only had a car!”

  “What would you do?” Mary said.

  “I’d make you drive, and I’d sit sideways and stare at you till you got beautiful.”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t tell me I’m plain again!” “I must be truthful.”

  “Why don’t I know when I’m beautiful? It’s such a rare thing with me, you’d think I’d light up inside as well as out.”

  “You do. When you’re beautiful, you’re so light inside that it’s dark out here.”