The Girl With the Golden Shoes

by Colin Channer

  “When he start to trot it going be kind o’ rough. And the way you was talking I think you want to reach town really quick.”

  “When you talk about trot and all that, it have me a little nervous,” she confessed. “He could see where he going? How he know where he going in the dark? Next thing something frighten him and he throw we off.”

  He slipped an arm around her waist and used one hand to hold the rope.

  “This horse is a good horse,” he said. “As long as he don’t think you want to fight me or nothing, he will do the best for you.”

  When he felt as if she’d settled on the brawny colt, he asked, “So what you going to town to do?”

  She answered brightly, “Improve myself and find a work.”

  “What kind o’ work you can do?”

  “I could do any kind o’ work,” she said. “I ain’t ’fraid hard work, you know. As long as people ain’t try to bamboozle me and get me in any kind o’ tug-o’-war, I could do anything.”

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”

  He startled her.

  “What happen?”

  “Take your time. Slow down. Everybody ain’t from the countryside. I know Sancoche, but when you give it that backward twang you throw me.”

  “Not because you gimme a ride you could insult me, you know, sir. I begging you a ride and I grateful for it, but I could walk my walk and reach where I going. I ain’t take insult.”

  But when all this had left her mouth, she thought, You need to learn to hold you tongue. Suppose the man get vex and put you off, what you going do? The road hard. The way long. Bangarang down in Black Well. Tell the man you sorry. As old-time people say, when you hand in a lion mouth, take you time and pull it out.

  “Mister …” she began, before he interrupted with, “I’m sorry.”

  He said it in a way designed to touch her heart…mannish in his voice but childish in his tone.

  Before she could speak again, he added: “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “Well, it was an ungrateful thing to say,” she said. “And I’m not ungrateful. Believe me. I just tired.”

  “I’m tired too,” he replied, and placed his chin beside her neck. “We’re two tired people. We’re both sorry that we’re tired. We have so much in common that we’d make such good friends. Let’s do that. That’s what I want to do. I just want to ride with you and be your friend, and talk to you and get to know you. I want to know the way you think.”

  She smiled. The movement of the horse beneath her was a mounting pleasure; but more importantly, the man had made her feel that he’d perceived her as a person with a mind.

  “What you want to know?”

  She squeezed a shoulder to her ear.

  “I want to know about…you,” he half-stuttered. “About how you feel in general…about life.”

  In English, the language of all things important and bright, she said, “I think to be boring is one of the most awful things that could happen in life.” In truth, she meant “bored.”

  “Are you an exciting person?” he asked in English more fluent than hers.

  “I think so. But I just haven’t got the chance to do a lot of things I really want to do.”

  “Like what?” he asked warmly.

  “Like to go to Europe.”

  Her mind began to drift. And while she saw herself arriving in a car at La Sala and working in a store, and eating only beef and chicken at her meals and feeding fish and lobsters to her dog, the rider gripped the stallion tightly with his knees and ground against her flanks.

  Getting no resistance, he slid a hand along her leg, which felt damp and firm and outward-curved with strength beneath her long blue skirt. With his thumb, he traced it where it had a solid crease along the side, where down below, he knew, there lurked the heavy bone.

  “How much is for a pair o’ shoes in town?” she asked, distracted, returning to Sancoche.

  He quickly moved his hands. She’d begun to shift her weight as if she’d just awoken from a dream.

  “Are you comfy?” he asked. “You seem unsettled.”

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “Maybe is because I know that Black Well coming up.”

  “Oh. I thought you’d leaned against my pistol.”

  “Oh. You have a gun?”

  “Not that we’ll need to use it. I could walk through Black Well any time.”

  He leaned away from her and fussed around his waist and made a mental count, then uttered, “There.”

  “That feels better,” she told him when he eased her back to lean on him again.

  “Now what kind o’ shoes you would like?”

  She paused to think. Accustomed to the horse by now, she turned her head to speak.

  “The kind you wear to work in a office or a shop.”

  “I ain’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but you have money to buy shoes?”

  He tapped her with his boots against her heel.

  “I might,” she answered in a way she thought of as mysteriously. In fact it was vague, as if she had no clue at all.

  “You ain’t really know town, do you?” he asked in a sympathetic voice.

  “What you trying to say? Of course.”

  He didn’t challenge her, but proceeded in a tone that said that any difference of opinion when it came to town had little consequence because his perspective was right.

  “I ain’t mean to disappoint you, but them fuckers—excuse my language—ain’t like to give negritas certain jobs, you know…in banks and office and shops. But you know this already of course.”

  “I ain’t care what they like to do,” she said. “I just want to know what shoes you have to have to work there.”

  “Well, being that I used to own a store,” he said, in English now, “I know a thing or two. Everybody else in my family are police, as I told you. That is one of the ways how I was able to get this .38. Be that as it may, I am the only one who had the head for business. But that too is for another day. Back to your question about shoes. You can’t just wear any shoes when you work in a place of business, you know. You have to wear the finest shoes. And the finest shoes in the world are English shoes. You can’t go for the kind of job you’re talking about in Spanish shoes or American shoes.” He slapped his thigh for emphasis. “No way. Wear one of those and the boss will take one look at you and say you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “For true?”

  “Absolutely. Now why would I lie to you?”

  “No. I’m not saying you is a liar, sir. Is just a phrase.”

  “I know it’s just a phrase, sweetheart. But so is ‘Why would I lie to you?’”

  “Oh.”

  “I know about English shoes, you know. I know so much I could write a book. I know the English very well. I met a lot of them when I lived in Europe.”

  “Really!”

  She was so excited that she tried to turn around to face him. She lost her balance and he held her waist, then found and squeezed her hand.

  With his fingers playing on her palm, he said: “I used to live there for a very long time.”

  He said this in the kind of breathy tone in which a singer introduces certain kinds of sentimental songs, and she reacted with the gush of folks who purchase tickets for those certain kinds of shows.

  “Where?” she asked him. “Which part? Tell me.”

  “Paris,” he said. “Then after I lived in Paris, I moved …”

  “To where?”

  “Oh, after Paris…let me see…I lived in so many different places. Oh…after Paris I moved to France.”

  “And what about the war?” she asked. It struck her that she hadn’t read the news. “You see the war?”

  “See the war?” he chortled. “See the war? My love, I fought the war?”

  “Oh Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s why you need to listen when I talk. That’s why when I tell you about shoes you should never doubt me. You need English shoes, my friend, and those shoes are
expensive. How much money do you have on you right now? How much could you put down on a counter for a pair of top-class English shoes?”

  “Five pounds,” she said with force.

  The man exploded in deep-throated laughter.

  “That can’t buy it?” she asked with doubt, revealing that she didn’t know that she was right.

  More excited now, he laughed again.

  “Okay, then…fourteen pounds. I could walk into one o’ them stores and fling down fourteen pounds on that counter and say, ‘Gimme you best pair o’ goddamn English shoes. I have fourteen pounds on me right now.’”

  He stopped the horse and put both arms around the girl.

  “Good shoes like that cost forty pounds,” he said. “With fourteen pounds you couldn’t even buy a single foot.”

  Estrella Thompson raised her head to calm herself, then dropped her chin and cried.

  “But it’s not the end of the world,” he added in a fatherly way. “Oh, hush.”

  “It ain’t you feeling pain. So you can say what you want.”

  “I know pain,” he improvised. “I know a kind of pain I hope you’ll never understand. Look …”

  He allowed his voice to fade.

  “What happen to you?” she asked him, working to control her breath.

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “What happen?”

  “I…just don’t want …”

  “Tell me?”

  Her voice was creamy like a soft eruption.

  “I want to. But I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You have to try.”

  “I know, but …”

  She told him sternly: “Do you know how many times I want someone to hear me and it ain’t nobody there?” She held his arms and used her weight to rock them. “I thought you said you wanted me and you to be good friends?”

  He sighed. He hummed. He moaned. Then said, “When they shoot me in the war, you don’t think it hurt? It hurt so bad. It hurt so bad. It hurt so goddamn bad. As I talk about it now, I feel the pain as if it was happening again.” She felt him shiver. “I thought I was going to die. Death is not a easy thing. When it stare you in the face, you ain’t want to see it close again. And that’s how it feel when you talk about it.”

  “I know it hard to talk about, but…what happened?”

  “Three Japanese ambush me in Berlin. But I got them though. They thought I was dead. But I saw them running in the dark. And as I lie down there, thinking that was it, I shoot them down like birds.”

  “In the dark?”

  “In the dark. Dark night just like this. Well, not so dark, but noisy. Fighting is a cantankerous thing.”

  With this, he got off the horse and walked away.

  “Where you going?” she cried. “I ain’t want this horse to run away with me…and…and how you doing down there?”

  She couldn’t see him in the dark, and she imagined rightly that his arms were raised toward the gods.

  “I am a damn disgrace!” he screamed toward the sky. “I am nothing but a big disgrace!”

  “What you mean? No. That ain’t true.”

  “Of course I am. I should be taking care o’ you to rass and instead o’ doing that I’m crying like a baby. Oh lord. This thing called war is hell.”

  She stumbled off the horse and groped toward his voice.

  “You can’t leave the horse alone,” he called out, as he took a path toward a spot he often used.

  Estrella led the horse toward the rider’s heavy breathing till she felt his hand against hers in the dark.

  She left him with the horse and went to stand some yards away, allowing him the privacy to cry. Her whole being felt exposed and tender, and her fourteen-year-old heart was full of sympathy and awe for this traveler, this soldier, this stranger who’d come to her rescue, this gentleman who’d lifted her and placed her on his brave and faithful horse and tried to get to know her as he took her to the place where she’d get a chance to fix her damn unlucky life.

  “What is your name?” she heard him asking from behind.

  “Estrella,” she said. “Estrella Thompson is my name. And what is yours?”

  “Simón,” he said. “Simón…Simón…Bolívar.”

  She said in English, “That’s a wonderful, beautiful name.”

  “And you, my love, are a beautiful, beautiful girl.”

  “How do you know? You never seen me.”

  “Because…beautiful people have beautiful…they’re just beautiful all over. Come here. I want to use my hands to know your beautiful, lovely face.”

  “Do you find me interesting?” she asked.

  He sat on a stone at the foot of a tree.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

  He placed a cheek against her stomach, touched and stroked her face, then slid his hands across her body from her shoulders to her thighs. She removed his hat and rubbed his head as if he were her nameless wooden dolly come to life.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened in the war,” she said, delighting in the texture of his silken hair.

  The rider stood and shrugged and slouched around the tree, knowing she would follow. She slipped her arms around his neck and felt his body stiffen in her tight embrace. There was a near maternal softness to his middle, an endearing strangeness in a slender man.

  She pressed her diamond face against his chest. He smelled of rum and cedar shavings and carbolic soap, but none of them intensely. When she squeezed herself between his arms she felt secure, as if her tender feelings grew an instant shell.

  The rider was a man of patience, and he held her without moving. When he was certain that her feelings wouldn’t change, he sent his strong hands sliding down her sides and up again as potters do with clay.

  “Why you touching me like you want something?” she asked him in her awkward country way.

  They’d been kissing slowly for several minutes, and he’d placed her hand against his pants while she stroked the thing she found there till it felt as solid as an ear of corn.

  “If you offered me something I would take it,” he said as they stroked each other. “But I would never ask.”

  “Beg me the right way and maybe I give you.”

  His hands were masters exercising their control. One was sweeping down along her side, around her back, swooping with her spine. The other one had reached beneath her skirt and was touching her so lightly that it felt as if he meant to finely sand the rims of muscle slanting from the cleavage of her bottom to her thighs.

  “You are so finely made,” he whispered. “So finely fashioned. Jesus was a carpenter. He made you out of wood.”

  “But look how you mouth full o’ sweet talks,” she said. “And still you won’t come out and tell me what you want.”

  “You know what I want,” he told her.

  “Well, touch it then. If you dumb, you dumb. Come on, dummy. Touch it. Show Mama what you want.”

  He paused, overwhelmed. He was accustomed to women who were coy.

  “You ’fraid?” she softly taunted. “Like how you big horse scare me, my little catty make you scared? Big man like you who fight war and thing? Who kill man and thing? A little catty ain’t supposed to frighten you.”

  “Put my hand on it.”

  As she led his hand into the clenching hump of fur between her legs, he used the other one to pull her buttons, starting from her neck.

  When the blouse had been undone, he ran his hands along the curving, rising length of her sea-strengthened smoothness. Amazed by its perfection, he laughed.

  “What sweet you?” she asked.

  “I just don’t know what else to do.”

  He unhooked her frayed brassiere.

  She told him: “Take care. Mind the pins.”

  He obeyed, and she slipped out of her skirt and hung it with her blouse and undergarments on a limb above her head.

  “But we have to make haste,” she told him, then turned around and gripped the tree and hoisted u
p a leg.

  “No, no, darling. Take your time and face me.”

  When she’d placed her back against the tree, he knelt before her with his trousers tucked into his long black boots, held her by the hips, and swept his tongue across the rosy droplet barely sagging from her pubic hairs, and she sputtered like he’d thrown her overboard while she was sleeping.

  “Did I frighten you?”

  His head was clamped between her knees.

  If Simón take his hands from me right now, Estrella thought, I going fall down in a pile. I never feel nothing like this before. It feel like he pull out all my bones. Or like my body was a shaking tooth and he just play with it till it nearly turn to pain.

  If you frighten me? Yes, you frighten me, yes. Because any man who could do this to me could wreck my blasted life. Could have me thinking ’bout this and nothing else. Make me stay home instead o’ going to work in the morning. And I ain’t want nobody rule me like that. I ain’t want nobody rule me with nothing at all. And how the rass I come to this? How it go from talking to something like this? This ain’t what I out for—taking man in bush.

  “I have to put on my clothes,” she said, reaching for the limb. The faucet of emotion was turned off. “You okay?”

  “Is this some kind o’ joke?”

  He staggered to his feet in disbelief.

  She couldn’t find the pin for her brassiere and she grumbled as she looked, talking to herself, cursing just beneath her breath as if he weren’t there. She gave up trying to find the pin in the dark and slipped on her skirt before she stepped inside her bloomers—a habit that had started when Old Tuck had nearly caught her with a boy.

  Dressed, she stuffed the bra in the pocket with her money and her knife.

  “How long till we reach town?”

  “Walking,” he answered, “a very, very, very long time.”

  “Don’t get sulky and contrary now,” she said across her shoulder as she walked toward the horse. “Come visit me tomorrow at my place in town.”

  Estrella wasn’t being dishonest. She was playing at being adult—reaching forward into what she wished to be her coming life, a life in which she’d have the means to live alone and have the privacy to entertain whenever she might please.

  “Don’t play me for a fool,” the rider said.