Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

by Lorraine Ray

  What was it about those shoes that frightened me so? The mysterious pair of well-cared-for oxford wingtips appeared, without explanation, sitting alone on the curb outside my home one broiling June afternoon six months ago.

  I made it a habit in the late afternoon to fix myself a single cup of coffee, dipping my favorite blue plastic measuring spoon in the coffee can to measure it precisely and to pour it into the filter of the coffeemaker (it's an idiosyncrasy of mine that I am careful when measuring things) and then to roam about the house twiddling the venetian blind cords so as to get the late afternoon Arizona sun streaming in at just the right angle; how gorgeous it looked making a celestial glowing spot, like the red spot on Jupiter, on my Grandmother's armoire in the corner of my bedroom. Of course, for the rest of the day the Arizona sun wasn't so pleasant, let me say that, and I had to close all the blinds around the house entirely by nine in the morning and live in a modern version of the old Natives' desert cavern, or you could say I was estivating like the animals here, but late in the day, the sun shined benignly enough. After the blinds were angled perfectly, I would ordinarily have turned to power up my laptop and it would have glowed and beeped in response: welcome to the blog-o-sphere. But that day something about the unrelenting and despondent nature of the mourning doves' call from the drive made me linger at the front window, and I adjusted the blinds so that I could look out at the sunny scene on the street. I scanned the bottom of the cactus hedge where there were several old commercial flyers inside pink plastic bags, those were folded like huge, party-sized tortillas, and I was thinking that I really need to get out there and use a rake to pull the unsightly old advertisements out of the hedge, when I spied, through a gap in the cacti, those abandoned shoes on the curb.

  No, I'm rushing ahead with my story. I'm telling it wrong. Firstly, I didn't think they were shoes at all. I took them to be somethings. Unknown somethings. Perhaps, I thought, what I was seeing out there on the curb were some of those hunks of bark which the wind is forever stripping out of the palm trees around here, and the reason I thought that is because the spot where the things appeared lay directly under my tallest palm tree, the one that overhung the curb. The rich brown color and glossy polish of the objects was just like the palm bark that blows down and sits wherever it wishes. Two pieces of palm bark sitting there on the curb wouldn't have been unusual, no, I have seen that before and could have easily dealt with it. Those things come down all the time and never frighten me. Maybe palm wood is a little light, like a prop from a movie, I've often thought that before, nevertheless I've never been frightened by pieces of palm wood. Curious would be more like my reaction in that circumstance. Had it been palm wood, but it wasn't.

  Through the blinds, I studied the supposed palm chunks more carefully and came to the conclusion that those shapes were too small and too oblong to be pieces of my tree. Could the thing on the curb be one shape-a dead animal?

  Oh, the desert spits out horrible things from the ground: snakes, tarantulas, lizards, scorpions. You have to get used to that when you move here, which I did about a year ago, buying an old railroader's bungalow for very little money. I was downsizing, you see, preserving every bit of my retirement funds, a pension from an aerospace company where I was an engineer, and preserving my social security, fleeing to the desert from my home in Everett, Washington because of my severe rheumatoid arthritis.

  If it were a dead animal there on the curb, I reasoned, I might need a shovel. I kept one for just such a contingency in a small tin shed in the backyard, and I was moving away from the front window and planning to retrieve the key to the shed from the labeled envelope in my dresser drawer when I realized that it would be strange if one of the horrid live animals in my neighborhood hadn't already carted off this dead one draped on my front curb. Then I peered at the curb one more time-intensely-and I recognized the curvy shape of the dark blots as human in origin. Probably shoes.

  I came out, first checking the porch with the peephole, then unlatching the deadbolts, and finally slinking out onto the broad porch. I stepped a ways along the walk and looked back. My little dark house had a comforting look behind me. The eaves came down as if they were sheltering wings or loving arms; I hated to leave the protection of the broad concrete porch and its thick pillars to go out there and look at those weird things that had housed another person's feet at some point in time. What were they doing there in front of my house anyway?

  The late afternoon concrete baked the soles of my bare feet. The sun broiled my skin and blinded me.

  By the time I had reached the cactus hedge, I knew for certain what rested there on the curb.

  Shoes! Dress shoes. A man's pair of dress oxford wingtips made from reddish saddle leather. Who in the world would have done such a thing to me?

  Their precise, careful positioning disconcerted me, scared me. There, I said it, the shoes scared me; each shoe sat so pertly on the curb as though they had a message to deliver to me. The arrangement which someone had made with the shoes looked so methodical, each an exact twinning, and yes, I'm methodical myself, persnickety my grandmother Althias Kerrigan Grayson always called me. I know you guessed that problem of mine.

  I knew at once that those were no innocent shoes that had tumbled out the door of a parked car nor could they have jostled out of the packing box on the bed of a pickup. No, someone had carefully aligned both toes so perfectly, they overhung the street without a centimeter's difference. The laces draped identically. It was as though I had stepped into the bedroom of an uptight banker.

  But why was I getting so upset about the arrangement of these silly lost shoes? It wasn't the first instance of strange things at my house. When I moved into my little adobe bungalow, it was winter, and I had made a fire on the first night. I arranged the mesquite logs perfectly and used a long match to light a carefully wrapped bundle of twigs and newspaper. I settled back into my armchair to enjoy the aromatic scent of the desert wood burning, but in a few minutes I noticed the edge of one flame jiggling. Then my entire mesquite fire began shaking, dancing, and sparkling! That was a shocking mystery, but the whole thing turned out to be easy enough to explain. Being so near the Southern Pacific railroad tracks meant the passing trains actually jostled the earth and therefore my hearth. You've never lived until you've seen an animated fire.

  And being close to the railroad tracks meant something else. It meant that the railroad attracted vagrants; I got used to finding peculiar things dropped in my yards by passersby.

  The first week in my house I picked up a baseball hat and a jacket from the street. The next week I found a dirty T-shirt dropped in my hedge. I wrestled a teeny folded pink mitten from where it had been stuffed in a gap of my rusty chain link fence a month later, it was aged and the inside still bright pink and the outside the color of canned salmon. A child had put that there on a cold morning, no doubt. And a few weeks later a grubby tube sock, with several knots in it, drooped over my house numbers, though I thought about that for a whole day and eventually explained it as the forgotten plaything of a distracted dog. That was fairly obvious to anyone.

  Something about those shoes made them different, though. I couldn't explain them as belonging to a vagrant or a child or a dog. And no other piece of abandoned clothing appears to be waiting the way shoes do. Perhaps it is because they sit up and contain a three dimensional space, like expectant dogs. You see them at the foot of a bed, at your beck and call. So how did those shoes get there?

  Was it a macabre practical joke? A malicious joke? Did someone intend to mock me for my intense precision? Occasionally, other engineers at the plant in Everett had done things like that to me, leaving joke items on my desk to disturb me. Once someone had even left a pen made to look like a syringe with red ink for blood in my desk, but I never mentioned it to anyone in case they were hoping it had bothered me. You can see I had reasons to be suspicious of the shoes. The question I needed to address was did the arrival of these shoes and their careful arrangement mean
someone was trying to leave a message for me?

  I began peering around at the other houses to see if anyone on the street was watching me find the shoes.

  But the street was deserted.

  Why didn't anyone come home from work? If someone drove in, I reasoned that I could stroll over casually and ask them about the shoes without having to ring their doorbell or knock on their door. I hated ringing the doorbells of neighbors.

  A part of me knew no one was going to come home right then. I had realized that people in the desert southwest return to their homes late in the day during the summer. They stay late at work and continue on to restaurants with coworkers, in order to reduce their air conditioning bill.

  Had the person who left the shoes known that I would be alone when I found them?

  What an odd thought. I reassured myself that no one meant those shoes to be there. No one meant to bother me in particular. The whole thing had to be some kind of accident. I had not met any of my neighbors, and therefore they couldn't possibly hold a grudge against me. I was letting the late afternoon heat and the creepy brightness distort my view of reality. Something about the heat in the afternoon here does make things creepy. It's sometimes hard to even locate another person. Everyone is busy estivating, as I explained, because the streets are broiling in early June.

  I dared not touch those shoes, but I examined them closely.

  They had been polished. The grooves and holes of the wingtip patterns were carefully cleaned, but still held teeny amounts of polish. New laces hung neatly arranged, not tied, but left draping nicely over the shoe sides. The tongues hadn't buckled inside the shoe, the inner liner was clean. The creases on the sides showed how often the wearer bent himself to his tasks.

  Signs of resolve-new silver taps on the toes and newly resoled heels? I hadn't touched them yet, but the heels did look as though they had been replaced recently.

  Had the owner moved recently to the southwest and found the conservative leather uppers unbearable? The prior day's temperature topped one hundred and ten, which isn't all that unusual. Had their owner been crossing town and simply slipped them off and gone on, I supposed, sock-footed, barefooted? Who could imagine such a thing? The image was absurd.

  I left them there and retreated to the safety of my home. Several times in what was left of the daylight I parted the venetian blinds to peer at them. Could shoes set in front of a house be a sign, an evil omen from another culture? Had I offended a neighbor who practiced cult threats?

  I ran through my idea of the various neighbors. An elderly man next door. A young woman and her child across the street. They weren't particularly friendly, but none of them seemed threatening. None of them seemed the type to practice voodoo.

  I came back outside, cautiously, when it was dark and approached the mysterious shoes again. I bent over and got up the nerve to slip two fingers into their backs-I was horrified to think of some stranger's foot having been in there where my fingers were-and I lifted them. They were well-made shoes, and quite heavy. I glanced around furtively and took them inside. How foolish I felt to be behaving as though I were stealing them from someone. Those shoes had been dumped on me. They had imposed on me enough!

  First, I put them on my couch and sat down next to them to look at them closely for a while. While I wasn't afraid of them, I didn't relish the proximity. Next, I moved them to the hearth. I sat studying them to see what they could tell me, like Sherlock Holmes does in all his stories. Then, I grilled them aggressively in my mind, probing them for signs of weakness, hoping to elicit confessions of what they were up to on my curb. Next, I interviewed them, asking them many pointed questions and considering them from various angles with less venom. Finally, I conversed with them openly and freely, searching for their experiences in an honest forum, exchanging views, so to speak.

  Frankly, they seemed too much like unwelcomed company after an hour or two.

  They became less menacing and annoying once they were shoved inside a grocery bag. Finally, I was able to take them outside and stow them in the trunk of my car; I did that hurriedly. But when the deed was done and the shoes were out of sight, I hesitated in my thinking-should I really donate them to a charity the next day? Were they someone's, someone who wanted to come back for them? Someone who would be expecting me to be their caretaker?

  I left them in the trunk of my car overnight, though when I was in bed I began thinking that my neighbors would surely come over the next morning and ask about the shoes, if they were lost. Not that I knew any of my neighbors. Maybe they didn't know that I lived in the house now? How strangely horrible it seemed to me that the shoes could have stayed there all day and no one would have thought to come over and ask me about them. And no one took them. It made me feel isolated. Had I made no better friends with my neighbors than to have a strange pair of shoes sitting there and have no one ask about them, even in humor?

  After breakfast I resolved to change the intolerable state of my isolation. I got my keys again and took the shoes out of my car trunk.

  I placed the shoes back on the curb exactly as they had been and stood beside them and studied them. I acted out the scene of discovery from the day before.

  No one even noticed me. The morning was already hot again and no one was outside their house.

  Nothing bothered me more than contacting neighbors and I hadn't done it once since I had moved from Washington, but it was now or never. I picked up the shoes, put them in the paper bag again, and strode across the street to the house with the young woman and child. I rang the bell, though my heart was beating frantically.

  She had a little girl child on her hip-the lady who answered the door. The girl was sucking an orange Popsicle and she tried to lay it against her mother's cheek. Her mother flinched and held the child's hand away. "What is it?" she asked me.

  She didn't recognize me.

  "I live across the street in the little green adobe bungalow. My name is Monty Grayson."

  "Yes," she said. "I am Jean Gonzalez, and this is my girl, Sammy."

  "Hi," said Sammy, waving her Popsicle at me.

  "I'm sorry to bother you like this," I began, "and I know this is coming out of the blue, but I found these shoes, a pair of nice dress shoes, sitting on the curb outside my home just now." I had decided to lie about when I found them so as to seem natural. I showed her inside the bag where the mysterious shoes were. "I was wondering if you know anything about them?"

  She came closer, opened the screen, and I was shocked when she came right out and stood on the porch with me. "No. Probably somebody just left them."

  "Probably," I said.

  "They're such nice shoes. Strange," she added.

  "I thought that," I said. "I thought the same thing. These are very nice, expensive shoes. It says they're made in Chicago and I looked up the company and these are very expensive shoes, actually."

  "Too nice for leaving," said my neighbor.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Funny though," she laughed.

  "Yes, it's funny," I agreed happily. "I thought it was funny, too."

  "It's funny," crowed the little girl.

  "But you don't know anything about them?" she asked.

  I was surprised she was taking any interest at all and talking to me. It was quite pleasing to talk to someone even about something so trivial. "No. I don't. I can't imagine how they got there. They are nice shoes."

  "They might be my neighbor's," she said, frowning and growing concerned.

  "Do you think so?" I tried to imitate her concern. I looked around me in confusion. "Which neighbor?" I asked.

  "Tito. Next door to you. He has dropped things in the street before. Accidentally. He has palsy sometimes. But mostly he drops groceries and receipts."

  "Do you want to ask him?" I suggested. "I can leave the shoes with you."

  "Well, let's walk over together now. You can explain about them. And you can meet him."

  "Okay, if you think so," I said.

&nbs
p; Jean and Sammy and I strolled over to the little pink railroader's bungalow next door to mine and I was glad when Jean stepped forward and rang the doorbell. A man of about my age answered the door.

  "Hi, Jean," said the man, stepping out from behind the screen onto his porch with us.

  "Tito, this is Monty Grayson. He's living next door to you."

  "Oh, I didn't know it. I don't see you out. How nice to meet you," he said. We shook hands and his handshake felt a little shakier than mine. Of course, that was the palsy.

  "A little while ago Monty found these fancy men's shoes just sitting out on his curb like they didn't have a care in the world. I wondered-you didn't drop them, did you?"

  "No, they're not mine. That's very strange."

  I worried that Tito might have seen me replace them on the curb just then. I couldn't tell if he was only pretending to go along with my story. I was assured by his words, but I couldn't believe in them entirely.

  "Kind of grand shoes for vagrants," said Tito. What a surprise it was to me that he was taking an interest in my predicament. I had felt certain that I would be the only person to think the shoes sitting there had been strange.

  "I thought so too." I said, practically yelping. "But maybe that's why they left them?"

  "That's a good idea. The shoes were too good. But why not sell them?" said Tito.

  "I suppose they tried, but with this heat no one wanted them," Jean joined the fun of imaging scenarios that could explain what had brought the shoes there.

  "They got too heavy?" Tito suggested.

  "They were set out to air after being polished and someone stole them, but they got too heavy!" said Jean.

  "Well, if you say you don't know anything I'll have to do something with them myself," I began. I immediately regretted saying that as I seemed to have put a damper on the conversation, the speculation, which we were so merrily engaging in together, but Tito didn't skip a beat.

  "Let's donate them to our community center, Un Rincon de Los Amigos. Unless you have a favorite charity," he added.

  "No, that's fine. I don't know any charities here. I'm too new in town. You take them." I handed them to him.

  "Oh, no. Why don't you come to the club to see it? We need some new members."

  "I don't speak Spanish," I confessed.

  "That's all right. Anyone can come. There aren't only Spanish speakers there. And the Spanish speakers all know English."

  And so that very next day my good neighbor Tito walked with me down to that clubhouse of his, which happens to be close by, and he let me donate the shoes in a section of the clubhouse created for just such a purpose. I think those shoes I had found were gone within a few days, but to tell you the truth I didn't pay much attention to them again, my focus was diverted from them and their eventual fate, because I was too excited to have a place where I belonged and people with whom to speak.

  Tito introduced me to everyone there and I was very nervous to meet new people. I told Tito I thought I would make a lot of errors (this has been my experience up until now), but he reassured me that I wouldn't. People at the clubhouse, he explained, were nonjudgmental. So that is how I first went to his clubhouse, at the back of a local barbershop, which is my own clubhouse now, where I can stay, and also the club of many of my neighbors, who are now my friends, though some of them tease me by saying "why don't you stay at home once or twice, Monty?"

  I have to brag that I have really become a different person due to the influence of Tito's wonderful club. I have undergone a miraculous metamorphosis, and I know it is difficult to believe, but I have actually made an awfully lot of friends there, and I go there every single day without fail and stay nearly the whole day until they have to throw me out on my ear almost. What do I do there? Well, I read magazines and visit with the people who show up. I sometimes play chess. Would you believe it of me? The lady at the desk always joshes me about the fact that I am the last one there and almost always the first one to arrive, and she likes to tell others about how they have to throw me out to get me out. She's an amusing woman.

  Her boyfriend's name is Cisco. He is a refined gentleman who works as an auto mechanic and he likes various kinds of dancing. He does not want me to meet them where they go dancing.

  I've had a few of them at the club say they wonder why I don't go out on my own somewhere sometime, but I don't want to be lonely anymore now that I have found friends for the first time in my life. Besides, I like them, I tell them. I like them all. There's nothing wrong with a man letting people know he likes them.

  I am getting to know details about them, the people at the club. I have begun this project in a methodical manner, being persnickety again, I suppose you could say. For example, I know many of the members' birthdays and their anniversaries (if they are couples) and I have even noted their patron saints. I am making a spiral notebook for all the information I gather. If they were originally from another country, I make sure to know facts about their country. This alone is quite an undertaking. The club has two Peruvians and three Cubans. There is a lady from Germany, too. She's Bavarian. I know where most of them live and what they used to do, because most of them are retired like me. Oh, and if they work, I try to give them small gifts which I know an employed person would appreciate, like a gift card to a restaurant nearby their work.

  Tito reminded me that some people might like to retain a great deal of privacy, the way that I was before I had the club in my life. But I can't worry if they are sensitive; I like finding out about them.

  Tito mentioned this subject again the other day and I had to remark that he was getting repetitious. He said, "Monty, are you really listening to what I'm saying?"

  I laughed. "I'm a detail-oriented person," I told him. "That's something that hasn't changed about me. It's the engineer in me. You can't repress it, when you're a detail-oriented person, even if you wanted to."

  If the clubhouse is closed, I phone the members. I phoned them all on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas Day this year. Every last person who went to the club. I have all their phone numbers, cell and land lines, and I checked in on how they were doing for their holiday, what they received, any interesting impressions that they had of the holiday. On most regular days, if I don't see them in the club, I might call them. I have noticed some people aren't there as often as they were when I first started attending. I wish they would come back.

  Things have changed, and I'm a different person now, and the point of my lengthy story is to illustrate that shoes, any strange shoes found in front of your house, could be the shoes of anyone, and any stranger could bring you to any friend, and it's a freer way to think. All right, maybe it sounds a little crazy, but it works for me and I think it would work for anybody. Lonely people must always think that way, the way I learned to think from the shoes left in front of my house.

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  THE END

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