A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  “Well, they kept on changing places this time.”

  “I should’ve stayed up. I never saw my father over a barrel in an argument yet.”

  “It was the worst argument that was ever argued,” Danny said. “Getcha Shine! Ten cents! They’d go along for a while, just the best of friends, and one of ’em would be asking questions, and the other’d be giving answers, and then all of a sudden—pow! One of ’em would figure he had the other in a hole, and he’d jump up, waving his arms and hollering and stamping and making sounds like he was tearing something in his neck, and finally he’d point at me, saying, ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear that?’ like the whole argument depended on me hearing a couple of little ole words. And then, before I ever got a chance to talk, the one that gave the bum answer would be laying over a barrel with his tongue hanging out. Shine ’em up like new! One dime! You’d think he was a goner for sure, but next thing you knew, there they were, the best of friends again, and the one that just got trimmed was asking the questions and reading pieces out of books, and the one that handed out the trimming was answering and listening and answering, and finally he’d answer the wrong answer, and—blooie! He was over a barrel. It was like a price-fight.”

  “What was the argument about?” Tootsie said.

  “Russia.”

  “That’s my father’s favorite argument.”

  “My uncle was for somebody named Trotsky.”

  “Trotsky! Then he must’ve lost the argument!”

  “I just told you it was a standoff.”

  “It couldn’t’ve been. Wasn’t my father for Lenin?”

  “Yes, but that don’t mean he had to win.”

  “If you’re for Lenin, you’ve got to win—if the other side is for Trotsky.”

  “Who’s this Lenin—the champeen?”

  “He’s the champeen over Trotsky.”

  “Who says so?”

  “My father says so.”

  “My uncle says different.”

  “Then your uncle is wrong.”

  “Why is my uncle always wrong? Suppose I said your father was wrong.”

  “Getcha shine! Not about Lenin. He couldn’t be.”

  “My uncle says Trotsky stands for a revolution all over the world, and your father says Lenin only stands for a revolution in one country. A revolution all over the world is a better revolution than a revolution only in one country, so Trotsky is got to be better than Lenin.”

  “A revolution all over the world is better if you can get it, but you can’t.”

  “Why not?” Danny said.

  “Because there’s some people that don’t want it.”

  “My uncle says if they don’t want it, then they don’t know what’s good for them, and you got to stuff it down their neck.”

  “Can’t stuff a revolution down anybody’s neck! That’s crazy!”

  “How do you get a revolution, then?”

  “You wait till the people ask for it, like a shoe-shine. A man don’t want a shoe-shine, then he don’t get a shoe-shine. You can’t knock him down and polish ’em up. You wait till he asks you.”

  “If people want a revolution, who do they ask?”

  “Nobody particular. They just stand up and say,‘The hell with this form of government. It’s only for the rich men and the capitalists. We want a new form of government.’”

  “My uncle says the people won’t do that for a long time, and the capitalists will go in Russia and crush Socialism.”

  “My father says the way to stop that is to make Socialism so strong that the capitalists will get crushed if they try to do any crushing in Russia. That’s what Lenin says too.”

  “Shine, mister!” Danny said.

  E Pluribus Unum

  The Congressional Limited fired itself from a cave in the Palisades and skimmed over the Hackensack Meadows toward Manhattan Transfer. Powered by a box-electric with diamond trolleys genuflecting to the overhead live-wire, the red train took a banked bend at fifty-five and shook off a posse of dust riding hard on the heels of the observation. Their feet cocked on its brass railing, Danny Johnson and his Uncle Web watched northern New Jersey recede. Square miles of cattail went away, and reed-stockaded creeks, and sudden shys of track, and scow-skeletons in black mud, and the rolling-stock of the nearby Lackawan’.

  “Manhattan Transfer! Manhattan Transfer!”

  The electric was cut loose, and it cruised, making way for a black short-stacked Pacific, a chunky cakewalking muscle-bound buck, and then there were two croaked and dismal longs, and once more the train was rolling. It crossed the Passaic, paused at Newark, and took the outside rail for the straight line through Princeton Junction. At eighty, overtaken hauls seemed hobbled, and northgoing varnish was sucked from sight in seconds: near things flashed past fused and fragmentary, and only the distant remained with the eye. The Pacific grew sideburns of steam, and gray hair flowed back over the cars and track.

  “Trenton! Philadelphia the next!”

  The Delaware [Among the pebbles on its floor, among broken glass and tin cans and castoff tires, in the silt and the slag and the sunken slough of a century and a half, lay a button from a buff and blue uniform, a lead ball for a flintlock, and a few now stone bones—relics of the Christmas night that saw, eight miles above this crossing, a handful of ragamuffins catch some red-coated bastards by surprise.] and the Schuylkill, and it was Philadelphia.

  “Wilmington the next!”

  Below Chester, the tracks bisected an arc that once was a fence for the Penns and the Baltimores, with monuments at every mile and a coat-of-arms at every fifth [They were gone now, the posts and the bench marks, and the men who had made them (a Mr. Mason, it might’ve been, and a Mr. Nixon or Dixon or some such name) were all but forgotten—except in the South.], and beyond that line lay the Brandywine, and it was Wilmington.

  “Ballamore the next!”

  From Elkton, head of Elk, and on down the great Chesapeake explosion into Maryland, the man who had spoken the first word spoken by the boy spoke other words, some new and others known, but all with the federal flavor of Tanforan and Chickamauga. One of these was Susquehanna, and there were Chincoteague and Choptank, Conowingo and Monocacy, and McConnellsburg and the rolling distant thunder of Cumberland, and now it was Baltimore.

  “Washington the next!”

  From Laurel on the Patuxent, the Pacific loafed, and gantries left behind seemed to be coming on, and track veered slowly off the main to pace the train, and a face seen was no longer erased by speed, and now relays of power were passed, and a goggled engineer waved at Danny from his cab, and it was Washington.

  “Last stop! Change for Richmond and points south!”

  * * *

  They passed the Willard, crossed over at the Treasury, and followed the high iron railing around the White House grounds. It had rained the night before, and the lawns, still damp, were smeared with sunlight, and the chocolate earth sent up its scent in the warming morning air.

  “Getcha shine!”

  Near the main gate stood a black bootblack.

  Danny touched his uncle’s arm, saying, “We ought to get a shine before we go in a place like the White House,” and receiving assent, he set his foot on the shoe-box and said. “Well, how’s business?”

  “Couldn’t be worse if folks went barefoot,” the bootblack said.

  “This ought to be a good stand.”

  “Ought-to-be ain’t is.”

  “How long you been in the game?”

  “This my third aministration.”

  “You mind if I tell you something?”

  “Can’t say till you tell it.”

  “You brush the cream dry. That’s wrong. You ought to fan it dry.”

  “What’s the diffence?”

  “Brush it, and you only brush it off. Fan it, and it sinks in.”

  “Why I want it to sink in?”

  “It makes a better base for the wax.”

  “Who been telling you all that?”
>
  “My partner.”

  “What he know about shoe-shine?”

  “He’s a shoe-shiner,” Danny said. “And so am I.”

  The colored boy broke work in the middle of a rag-sashay, and he stared up smiling. The smile was brief, however, and it was going away when he said, “White folks don’t shine shoes,” and gone when he said, “They only wear ’em.”

  “They shine ’em where I come from.”

  “That ain’t Washinton.”

  “I live in Harlem.”

  The bootblack’s eyes no longer attended his hands: the hands whacked wax on felt-for shoes, and the eyes looked up at eyes looking down. “Heard about that place,” he said. “It where I want to go when I die.”

  “Why wait? My partner lives there, and he’s still alive.”

  “Partner ain’t colored.”

  “Guess again,” Danny said.

  The bootblack rose now, his finish-rag dragging on the ground, and he gazed beyond Danny at a white house striped with the black ribs of the railing. “You in partners with a colored boy?” he said.

  “Sure,” Danny said. “How much I owe you?”

  “You mean, he work for you.”

  “No, I kind of work for him.”

  “That couldn’t happen even if it happened.”

  “He gets the most out of the partnership because he’s a better shoe-shiner. How much I owe?”

  “You lyin’,” the colored boy said, “but we all square.”

  “That’s mighty nice of you,” Danny said.

  “We square, but you lyin’ your head off.”

  “Why do you keep on saying that?”

  “You lyin’ hard as iron.”

  “I’m not lying—and I’ll prove it by showing you a trick! Put your foot on that box!”

  With Danny kneeling before him, the bootblack was almost surprised into compliance, but in the end he said, “You lyin’, boy.”

  Danny caught his foot and drew it up to the stand, and then, whipping the wrinkles from a rag, he said, “I’m going to play you a tune. Take your pick: Yankee Doodle or Dixie.

  “Never heard that Yankee Doodle.

  “You pick Dixie, then?”

  “Pick Yankee Doodle”

  “I thought you never heard it.”

  “Heard the other.”

  “Here goes,” Danny said, and he brought the rag sawing down over a broken old shoe, and Yankee Doodle went uptown, riding a flitch of flannel, and in a flogged-out rhythm, he stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni, and then Danny reprised the last line, and his uncle joined in, and again, and the gate-guard joined, and once more, and the colored boy called it macaroni too.

  Danny rose, tossed the bootblack his rag, and said, “You’ll have ’em standing in line,” and then he followed his uncle through the outer portals of the White House. A little way beyond, he turned to wave a goodbye, and the colored boy, his face wedged between two bars of the fence, waved back with the rag.

  “You the lyin’est liar,” he was saying.

  * * *

  “Well,” Uncle Web said, “how do you like Washington?”

  “It’s all right, I guess,” Danny said, “but I wouldn’t want to live here. It’s a cemetery. It’s dead.”

  “A cemetery isn’t dead. Only the people.”

  “You look at a nice thing, and right away they tell you who died there.”

  “People die everywhere,” Uncle Web said.

  “But in Washington, they make a fuss about it.”

  “And the bigger the stiff, the bigger the fuss.”

  “Why should that be?” Danny said. “Take the Washington Monument. It’s five hundred and fifty-five feet high, but it’ll never make George Washington that high. He’s still the same size he always was, maybe even a little smaller.”

  “Take Ford’s Theatre. Is Lincoln smaller?”

  “The Monument was built long after Washington died. He never saw it, and the men that piled up all those stones never saw him, so the whole thing is only a tombstone, five hundred and fifty-five feet high, for a six-foot dead man. But Ford’s was built for living people, and Lincoln was living when he sat down in that box, and he was living when Booth sneaked up in back of him and fired that bullet in his brain, and he was still living when they carried him out to the house across the street. He wasn’t ever going to see the theatre again, but he’d seen it once, and that was enough to make it different than a stack of stones. They can do anything they like to Ford’s, they can turn it into a museum or build more stories on it till it gets to be as high as the Monument, but it’ll never be only a tombstone.”

  “Tell me something, Danny,” the man said, and now the boy was looking away. “Would you feel as you do about this town if the place was called Lincoln, D.C.?”

  “No,” the boy said. [You’d only loved your own father like that, not even God or Jesus Christ or the United States, only your own father, and always, for as long as you could remember, you’d hated the man with the derringer and the dagger: it’d been your own father’s head that he broke open with that ball, and your own father’s eyes that he closed once and for all, and your own father’s body that they carried away to the Petersen bedroom, and your own father’s blood that soaked the pillows, and your own father that so many people stood watching the whole night long, and your own good father that died in the early morning. You loved one, and you hated the other, and you always would—all your life!]

  * * *

  A guide had conducted a party through the rooms at Mt. Vernon, saying, “This was Washington’s bed-warmer.…This was Washington’s study.…This was the quill with which he.…This was his favorite chair.…This was the window at which.…In this room, the Father of our country breathed his…,” and now the party was touring the grounds. “These were the slave-quarters,” the guide said.

  A woman said, “The what-quarters?”

  “The slave-quarters,” the guide said.

  “I didn’t know Washington had slaves.”

  “All gentlemen had slaves in those days.”

  Danny said, “That’s what made them gentlemen.”

  The guide turned away. “This tree was planted by…,” he said.

  The woman said, “Washington would’ve been a gentleman even without his slaves.”

  “Sure,” Danny said. “He’d’ve been like Lincoln.”

  * * *

  “All aboard for Ballamore, Philadelphia, and New York!”

  From camp-chairs on the rear platform, Danny and his uncle watched a few stragglers hasten past along the ramp, and soon the buffer, the gates, and the train-shed seemed to drift away, and the trucks of the northbound Congressional began to spin out twin filaments of track, and looking backward in space, the boy looked backward in time as well, and what he saw was another train, a train of seven cars wreathed in black bunting, and in one of these he saw a piece of freight, not a mail-sack or a suitcase or a stenciled crate, but a mahogany box containing a dead passenger, and before the high domes of the locomotive he saw seventeen hundred miles of union earth, the same miles traversed by that passenger four years earlier, but they lay in reverse now, and the last was the first, and the first was the last, and the farms passed, and the ties and towns and telegraph-poles, began with the end and ended with the beginning, and the book of creeks and culverts, of stones and stakes, of seventeen hundred consecrated miles, read from right to left, and the boy saw seven million faces deployed along the ballast from the District of Columbia to the State of Illinois, and there were fires in the night, and the slow-spoken gloom of artillery, and tolling bells, and the heavy farewells of rain-soaked flags, and he saw famous men driven from famous birthplaces to points along the right-of-way, and he saw unknowns who had walked for a week to watch for a moment, and then the funeral-train was gone.

  “Ballamore! Ballamore the next!”

  CONCERNING SOME DIRTY LINEN

  The Johnson family was nearing the end of a Sunday cold-cut supper.
The coffeepot had been brought to the table, and the cinnamon of cinnamon-buns, a scent like that of carnations, rose to mingle with coffee steam. Mrs. Johnson poured. Mr. Johnson smoked. Danny Johnson thought.

  “What’s on your brain, son?” the hack-driver said.

  “Tootsie wants to rent a store next year.”

  “The trouble with a store, you got to pay rent.”

  “That’s what I told him, but he said we could handle more business and make more money.”

  “For the landlord,” the hack-driver said.

  “I told him that too, and he said the landlord wouldn’t get all the extra money, and I said he’d get some, and he said some wasn’t all. I said some was too much if it was rent, and he said the landlord had to get something for building the building.”

  “He gets a tablet in the Hall of Fame.”

  “I said what more did he want than the building, and he said the building was no good unless it was rented, and I said who told him to build it.”

  “That should’ve curled him.”

  “It didn’t. He don’t curl so easy. He said why should we kick about rent if we made more money with the store than we would’ve made without the store. I saw I had to crush him, so I said because we had to get down on our knees to make the money to pay the rent. He wasn’t crushed at all. He said there was no use biting our nose to spite our knees, and he laughed.”

  “A bitter laugh,” the hack-driver said.

  “I said we’d never get rich kneeling for some fat landlord, and all he did was laugh some more.”

  “He laughs too much. He’ll cry yet.”

  “He didn’t when I was around. He only said I was the second best shoe-shiner in Harlem, but I was a long way from being the second-best thinker.”

  “Which you took laying down.”

  “I took it standing up. I said I always thought I was a thinker and a half, and you know what he said to that? He said I was just a Bolsheviki.”

  “He’s a fine one to talk. His father could start a revolution in the College of Cardinals.”

  “I brang that up. I said if anybody was a Bolsheviki, it was his old man, and he said that didn’t mean he could tell the landlord to go to hell for his rent.”