A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  “I want to say a say,” Tootsie said.

  “Say it, Mr. Sanctions,” Julie said.

  “It isn’t what you expect, because it’s this: for once, Julie, I agree with you.”

  Julie grinned. “Ole Mr.Browder going to be mad on you, Communist college-boy.”

  “Talky-talk was all we were good for,” Tootsie said, “and while we were at it, black people were being killed. It’s never wrong to do something about that.”

  “Like what?” his father said.

  “Like being on the killing-end ourselves.”

  “Where, son—in Ethiopia?”

  “Where else? That’s where the killing was going on. All we had to do was go there and line up on the right side. We might’ve gotten killed for doing it, but at least we’d’ve been doing.”

  His father said, “Without the organized help of other countries, Ethiopia was bound to lose. All over the world, people were expecting a miracle—expecting good to win with spears over evil with planes—but they know better now, and if Ethiopia was the price of that knowledge, humanity got a bargain.”

  “You get no bargains when you trade with Fascism. You get what Julie just said: screwed.”

  “Tootsie, I’d like to ask you a question,” Dan said. “Why didn’t you go and fight for your people?”

  “I wasn’t brave enough, Danny.”

  Dan glanced at Mary, and then, looking down at his shoes, he said. “That was the question.”

  “You have another, though, haven’t you? What would I do if I got another chance?”

  “All right, what would you do?”

  “I’ll be damned if I know.”

  “That’s a good answer,” Dan said.

  Later, when he and Mary had left the house, he said, “It was a good answer because it was a brave answer. He doesn’t care what people think of him between now and the next time. What counts is what he does then, not what they think now—and I believe he will do something, because it takes bravery to let people wonder whether you’ll keep on being yellow. I envy him.”

  “What for?” Mary said. “How is he any different from you?”

  A PAIR OF ANNIE OAKLEYS

  Peterson entered Dan’s office, and seating himself on the spare chair, he cocked his feet against the desk.“You smell like you’re thinking,” he said.

  Dan studied a water-stain on the ceiling, trying, as he had often tried before, to wrest a simile for its shape from his mind, and, as always, he failed. “What’s it to you, Pete?” he said.

  “Semiannual check-up, good labor-relations—and all that sort of shite.”

  “Well, quit being a shitepoke. Butt out.”

  “What’re you all dolled up for? Who’s the occasion?”

  “Go back to your cash-register. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Don’t be a slage-wave. Down tools and turn the rascals out.”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, Pete?”

  “Nothing that a good counter-revolution won’t cure.”

  “You ride me like something’s eating on you. I think I eat on you.”

  “Damn right, you eat on me.”

  “That’s eating off you,” Dan said, “but I eat on you too.”

  “I pity you,” Peterson said. “That’s what’s eating on me. It hurts me to pass a guy lying in the gutter. I always try to get him to move into an alley.”

  “I eat on you because, no matter what a louse I am, you wish you were only twice as lousy instead of being a louse squared.”

  “To get as low as you, kid, I’d have to climb down to the bottom, hold my nose, and then really sink. From where you are, there’s only one direction: up.”

  “Then how come I’m sitting on your face?” Dan said. “You know, I never realized it before, but you’re the only guy in the world I’m superior to.”

  “As superior as a fart in a gale of wind. If you took your talents and laid them end to end, they wouldn’t reach halfway to where talent starts from. You’re not even the man in the street. You’re the man in the subway, and all that distinguishes you from the rest of the strap-hangers is a wish that you were one flight up. But that’s all you’re good for—a wish.”

  Dan contemplated him for a moment, and then he said, “That’s right, Pete. Now tell me what distinguishes you.”

  Before replying, the man watched an elevated-train run past the window. “I’d say I wanted to be the man in the el,” he said, “but I know you wouldn’t believe it, kid.”

  “I’m sorry, Pete. I shouldn’t’ve said….”

  “Forget it, kid,” the man said, and on his way to the door, he dropped a small envelope on Dan’s desk. “Feller give me those this morning,” he said. “Being you’ve got your other suit on, you can treat your wife to something more than supper.”

  DINNER WITH MARCO POLO

  “So you’re Mary,” Uncle Web said. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some twenty-seven years.”

  “Twenty-seven?” Dan said. “Why twenty-seven?”

  “Ever since I found out you were a man.”

  Dan gave Mary a glance, saying, “That’s something I’m still not too sure of myself.”

  “You’re a man,” Mary said. “Who should know that better than some of us women?”

  “I knew him when the issue was still in doubt,” Uncle Web said.

  “As soon as it was settled, I began to wonder what he’d do with his manhood.”

  Dan indicated Mary. “Do you approve?” he said.

  “Well, I’ll say this: as long as you had to choose, I approve the choice—but I don’t approve marriage.”

  “It was the only way I could get her, unc. She’d stand for only a certain amount of sin, and then she drew the line. What could I do?”

  “The same as I do—start to sin somewhere else.”

  “I thought of that, but at that particular time, I didn’t want to. I wanted to sin with Mary.”

  “Then what did you marry her for, you jass-ack? That made it legal, and there was no more sin.”

  “Now, there’s something I didn’t think of.”

  “Uncle Web,” Mary said, “I think you’re a bad influence on my husband. I think you’ve always been. But he’s crazy about you, and I’m crazy about him, so I guess I’m stuck with you both.”

  “More coffee, folks?” a waiter said.

  “Nobody ever gets stuck with me for long,” Uncle Web said. “I don’t marry people for the same reason I don’t marry places. But tell me, Danny. If you had to get tied down, why didn’t you pick a pretty one?”

  “Don’t you think she’s pretty?” Dan said. “She’s pretty to me”

  “If you want to see a pretty one, take a look at this.” The man drew out a wallet and flipped it open. “That’s what I call pretty.”

  “Hand it over, Danny,” Mary said.

  “Nothing doing. This is between us men.”

  “Madrid,” Uncle Web said.

  “A spic?” Dan said. “My sister-in-law’s a spic.”

  “I recommend the spies,” Uncle Web said.

  Mary took the wallet from Dan. “She is pretty,” she said. “So much so, I wonder how you could leave her.”

  “I’ll go back some time—when I don’t have to make love on a battlefield.”

  “What the hell is really going on over there?” Dan said.

  “I’ll tell you what I tell everybody else: sapheads are fighting sapheads. Same old set-up.”

  “Florencia says it’s different this time,” Mary said.

  “I don’t know any Florencia,” Uncle Web said, “but saps are fighting saps, and when they get through, there’ll be dead saps and live saps.”

  “You don’t talk the way you used to, unc,” Dan said. “You never used to say all people were saps.”

  “Knock around the world for fifty years, and you’ll say it too.”

  “I remember the letters you were always sending me. I still have some of them, and as much as anything else I know
of, they were what started me off liking people. Now they’re saps. What made you change? You were once a socialist.”

  “I’m still a socialist, and if people weren’t saps, they’d all be socialists too.”

  “Maybe they will be,” Dan said. “Maybe it’s just taking them longer to get there than it took you. That doesn’t make saps out of them, though.”

  “Put a dog in uniform, and he goes to a circus; put the same on a man, and he goes to war. Rockefeller couldn’t fool a dog into burying bones, but, by Christ, let him lift a finger, and a man’ll bury his own.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of the spies,” Dan said, “but if they’re anything like Florencia….”

  “Who the hell is Florencia?” Uncle Web said.

  “My brother’s wife,” Mary said. “She came to America on the combined lifetime savings of her family—four sisters, three brothers, and a father and mother. Some of them are gone now, but the rest are still living where she left them, in a village near Granada. Farmers, they call themselves, but the word that was coined for them is serfs. to this day, only one brother knows how to write, and he’d’ve been illiterate too if it hadn’t been for a decent parish priest. There are no schools in that village, and no doctors, and no sewers, but there are plenty of Civil Guards with pistols and patent-leather hats, and there’s a fine church with gold-embroidered altar-cloths and gold-and-silver images of the Crucifixion. The old priest is dead, and the new one gives writing-lessons limited to a single letter, a mark, and he teaches the people where to put it by telling them they’ll go to hell if they vote Republican. But they’ve been living in hell for a thousand years, and they aren’t frightened, and when the rich come out of the cities trying to buy votes with mattresses, the people take the mattresses and vote Republican anyway. They’re ignorant, Uncle Web, but I don’t think they’re saps.”

  “They’re saps with mattresses,” the man said.

  WE’LL BE COMRADES YET

  In the early evening, Dan and Mary sat before the open window watching it inhale their exhaled smoke. The day had been a warm one under a hovering haze, but now in the last light there was an advance freshness from a coming rain.

  “What did Mig have to say?” Mary said.

  “Mig?” Dan said.

  “In his letter.”

  “I haven’t had a letter from Mig in months.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I put it on the chiffonier, and I thought you read it while I was making supper.”

  When Dan opened the envelope, he said, “Christ, but this was a long time coming. All summer, it took. He wrote it on the ist of June.”

  “Maybe he didn’t send it right off,” Mary said.“Read it to me.”

  I’m not going to try and weasel out of being called a bum correspondent, because I consider that a known fact by now, and there’s no use in me even promising to reform, because no good will ever come of it. But that don’t mean I never think of you, kid, because I do, and often, and I think of your signora too, even if all I know about her is what you tell me and what I can gather from her photo….

  Mary said, “I didn’t know you sent him my picture.”

  “One of the ones we took on the beach a couple of summers ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Danny?”

  “It was the shot you wanted me to tear up, but I liked it best, and when I was writing to him once, I happened to have it in my pocket….”

  “Happened? You mean, it got there accidentally?”

  “What difference does it make how it got there?”

  “Danny carrying pictures,” she said. “You know, I’m beginning to fall in love with you.”

  And now, kids, prepare for a shock. Come September, Mikhail DeLuca, the Casanova of Avenue A, will stagger glassy-eyed into a bureau called ZAKS, and there he will fill out a little form, and then an official will pronounce us man and wife (meaning me and Irina, who will naturally be hanging around), and then the official will smile and wish us happiness—which I hope you kids do too….

  Dan turned to Mary, saying, “Well, what do you know about that?”

  “You’ve been married,” Mary said. “What do you know?”

  She’s what they call an agronomist, her special field being grape-culture (trust Mig to have a nose for the vino), and right now she’s down in the Crimea. The minute she gets back, either her room or mine is going to be available. No more of this waiting. Even Stalin would admit that marriage isn’t part of the Five Year Plan. Before Irina left, I tried to tell her a married woman could grow grapes just as scientifically as a single one, but she wanted one more season of experimenting (with grapes, of course, you bum) before getting hitched, and I gave in. How did I meet her? Well, how do you meet anybody? By accident—a non-Marxist attitude, by the way. She came to see the editor of the magazine with a story she’d written about the grape-country, and by mistake she walked into the composing-room. Kids, she never recovered from that blunder. The minute I saw her, she was as good as published and practically married. I’d’ve set that story up even if I had to leave out a Plenum Report. But it turned out to be a good story—and that’s my story….

  Mary said, “I hope he sends her picture.”

  “So Mig’s getting married,” Dan said. “Mig, the wonderful wonderful wop. Getting married.”

  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “Not surprised, exactly. It’s just that I never thought of ordinary things in connection with Mig.”

  “Marriage is ordinary, isn’t it?”

  “I mean, he was always so wrapped up in working for the people that I didn’t think he had time for anything else.”

  “People that work for the people are people themselves—or didn’t you know that?”

  “About Mig, I guess I didn’t.”

  “You’re a funny boy, Danny. You care for people just as much as Mig does, but whenever somebody tells you that all those things down in the street are people, you’re astounded.”

  Danny, when I said before that I think about you often, I meant it. We haven’t seen each other for a hell of a long time now, but as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t seem to make any change in our friendship—and the reason is, the friends you get when you’re young are the ones that mean the most. And even if it was years before we got together again, I’m sure it’ll always be like it was in the old days—and maybe better, Mr. Lovejoy, and you know why. I want to say, kid, that the best news I’ve had in many a moon was the news about you deciding to go to school. You couldn’t’ve done anything to make me happier, and I only wish I was there to take the classes with you. They’ll be over when you get this letter, so I want you to do me a favor: I want you to sit down and write me what you got out of the course. Keep up the good work, kid. We’ll be comrades yet….

  Dan folded the letter and returned it to its envelope, and then he sat looking at the dumb-show in lighted windows across the way.

  “What was she like, Dan?” Mary said. “Was she so very much prettier than I am? That’s all I want to know, and it’s all I’ll ever ask.”

  “Talk is thin-ice stuff,” he said. “Only actions are supposed to carry weight. I don’t know where that idea came from, because actions can be far falser than words. Sometimes you can do an act that has no meaning at all, and sometimes you can say a few words that contain your life….”

  “Go on,” Mary said.

  “I forgot the point I was making.”

  “A few words with a great deal of meaning.”

  “They’re gone. I lost track.”

  “A few words like, ‘I love you,’ maybe?”

  “How did you know?” he said.

  “What a lover!” she said. “He starts out to make a love-speech, and he winds up with his feet in his hat. Lover Dan!” He rose now and walked deeper into the dark room, but she followed and stood against him when he could retreat no further. “I’ll make a speech, Dan, if you’ll lend me those few words that slipped your mind. I�
��m for you, and I’ve been that way from the beginning. You’re the guy, that’s all, and you’ll always be the guy. You don’t like yourself very much, and it’s a puzzle to you why that should be one of the things I prize in you—but I prize everything in you, the good things, the rotten things, the likeable things, the hateful things, and that’s a puzzle to you too. You think you can take people apart and value their good and condemn their evil, but that’s treating people as if they weren’t people at all, as if they were only handfuls of small change to be separated into copper, nickel, and silver. People come in one piece, and either you take it altogether, or you refuse it altogether. If you refuse it hard enough, you hate it, and if you take it hard enough, you love it. I happen to take you hard, Dan.”

  “Did you really think the words had slipped my mind?” he said. “They won’t get away from me even when I’m dead.”

  A BELLYFUL

  Dan’s mother said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you aside.”

  “Wait,” Dan said, and he listened to voices coming through the transom from the parlor.

  [“Mary, you’re damn near as cute as my old lady.”]

  [“You ought to teach your son some of that.”]

  “No,” Dan said. “I’m not wondering.”

  “It’s the same story: things are bad.”

  “I saw the cab downstairs when we came in. If it ran over a banana, the jolt would wreck it.”

  “I try to talk Pop into selling it for junk and going to work with one of the fleets, but he won’t hear of it. With a private cab, he can still call himself his own boss. But what’s the good, if you can’t make a living?”

  “Ah, let him enjoy himself,” Dan said. “I remember you were after me about something once when I was a kid, and Pop came to my rescue, saying, ‘Let him alone, Polly. Let him alone.’ Well, let’s let him alone.”

  [“I’m kind of glad we’re private a minute, Mary, because there’s something been on my mind for a long time now. It’s personal, though, and I’ll keep it to myself if you say so.”]

  [“We’ve always been personal, you and I.”]