A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  “It’s been a great party, Julia, and I’ll never forget it,” he said. “Pack your stuff.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Do you mean that, Dan?”

  “It’ll be cold,” he said. “Wear the sweater.”

  She shook her head, saying, “You’re the last one that ever gets it for nothing,” and then, glancing about, she said, “Three-buck room and all other three-buck rooms, I kiss you goodbye.”

  Below, as they passed the desk on the landing, the clerk said, “Your key, Mr. Johnson.”

  The bus drew out of the terminal into a pillow-fight of snow, and it was far along the South Platte before Julia spoke for the first time since leaving the hotel. “To hell with you, Mr. Night-clerk!”

  she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Dan Johnson!”

  “I’m sorry you found out about that.”

  “I won’t use it against you, but why were you such a sucker?”

  “I wanted to see how it looked on paper,” he said, “and it looked good. It would’ve been better, though, if you thought I’d only been out for a lay.”

  “Why would it, Dan?” she said.

  “Because tomorrow I’ll be on my way up the pike.”

  “I hope you change your mind,” she said. “I told you I was still stuck for you, and I meant it.”

  “If I stay, sooner or later I’ll have to crawl. I’d hate to do that, but I think I just might, because there’s enough in you to crawl for.” [And now you were the silent one, and you wondered what would happen if you could speak the things you were thinking: they seemed to he most beautiful, and sometimes they even seemed to rhyme, but you found no words for them, and they dwindled away and died there in your mind, almost within reach of your mouth, but still a million miles from speech]

  The path and steps to the porch were deep in snow, and combs of it rose from the banisters and the railings, and more was settling in the saturated solution of the air: under the soundless fall, the night was mute [and you stood with her in the dumb dark, and she said, “Do me a favor, Dan: come upstairs with me. I’m not giving you a present now; I’m asking you to give one to me. Won’t you please, Dan …?” and then she opened the door and held out her hand, and you took it and let her lead you into the hall, and if the stairs stuttered that final time, you didn’t hear them, and if the woodwork gave off its smell of age, you lost it in a julia-flavored room, and there, in a way, you said some of the many things you’d had in mind—last-minute things before a journey].

  “Thanks,” she said [and you kissed her, you kissed every part of her face, but it wasn’t till you kissed her eyes that you knew she’d been crying], “and now goodbye, my God damn Dan…”

  TALK ABOUT YOUR CONSATUTION

  The man behind the wheel of the open Cadillac said, “Get in,” but Dan stood where he was. The man took a matchstick from his mouth, and with the limp end, he indicated the leather seat alongside him, saying, “Get in. That makes twiced.” As Dan obeyed, and the door clickclocked shut, the man trod the starter, and the v-63 rolled off through Mule Pass. “Know where this road goes?” the man said. “It goes away.”

  “It also comes back,” Dan said.

  “Not for you, except you want to get drug off in a sack.”

  “I’ve got a right to go anywhere I want.”

  “Know what I say when somebody talks rights? I say shite. You got no more rights in Bisbee than a corncob in an outhouse.”

  “It’ll be different some day.”

  “Till then, it’ll be the same, and you can swear by it. I’m telling you like a brother.”

  “Like a company-cop, you mean.”

  “Next place you light on, don’t ask where’s the Union Hall. I tell you like a brother.”

  “Running people out of town for nothing! What’s Bisbee—private property?”

  “You guessed it. Private as your ass.”

  “Anybody here ever read the Constitution?”

  The man laughed. “What the hell’s the Consatution got to do with the price of copper?” he said. “Every sheeny organizer that sticks his bill in Bisbee hollers Consatution, and the louder he hollers, the quicker he rides out on a plank. Consatution! Nobody talks Consatution, only sheenies and wobblies, and they talk just once. We found out how to take care of ’em back in ’17. How old was you then?”

  “Eight,” Dan said.

  “We’re in the war a couple or three months, and Bisbee’s running full-blast—and that’s the time them union bastards pick to ship in their sheeny wobblies. First thing you know, they call a strike over in the Warren District mines. The sheriff of Cochise County—Wheeler, his name was, Harry Wheeler—he rings up Governor Campbell, saying all hell’s tore loose here, and he needs the Army, but knowing full well, just like everybody else, that there ain’t no trouble in Bisbee a deputy can’t handle with a tin whistle. The War Department names some officer to come on over and have a look, which he does two different times, and the only trouble he reports is a greaser got throwed out of a whoor-house. (Jesus, it’s hot! Why don’t I put the top up over this wreck?) So we don’t get the troops, and the strike is going stronger than ever. In fact, it looks so good in Warren that the bohunks begin to get the itch in Jiggerville, Upper Lowell, and the Winwood Addition, and if they all go out, Phelps-Dodge ain’t going to mine no more copper to kill the Huns with. They’re patriotic, the company. Give all that copper away for nothing. So the mine-managers have a meet with Harry Wheeler and his gunmen, and in the middle of the night they dope out a plan. Talk about your Consatution!”

  The man swung the car off the highway and brought it to a stop before the propped-up flap of a roadside food-and-drink stand. He palmed the horn, and a woman wearing a faded cotton dress came out into the sun. “About time you showed up,” she said. “I wrote you a card last.…”

  “Shut up,” the man said, “and bring some beer.”

  The woman nodded at Dan and said, “Two!?”

  “One,” the man said, and when the bottle was brought, he clamped his lips on its mouth and kissed off only when it was empty. He spat out some foam and said, “That sure stunk. What’ve you got, Connie—the sweat-concession at the Copper Queen?”

  She said, “I ain’t seen much of you lately, Alf.”

  He said, “I ain’t been over this way.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Sheeny Bolshevik name of Johnson.”

  “He don’t look like a sheeny.”

  “He talks it.”

  How’s for buying him a beer?”

  “Beer? I’m throwing the bastard out of town!”

  “He still drinks, don’t he?”

  “I forgot to remember to ask.”

  “I don’t want anything,” Dan said. “Thanks.”

  “Water?” the woman said.

  “I tanked up at the Courthouse.”

  “Another beer,” the man said. “Where’s Joe?”

  The woman answered when she handed him the second bottle.

  “You’d know if you read the card,” she said. “Fort Huachuca.”

  “When’d he go?”

  “Last week.”

  “When’s he due home?”

  “Who the hell knows?”

  The man put the car in gear. “Pay you on my way back, Connie,” he said, and a mile up the road he slung the empty end-over-end at a rock. “… Talk about your Consatution! That same night, Harry deputizes every white man that owns a .45, and two thousand of us pull a raid on the most peaceable bunch of strikers that ever struck. We split up in crews, and having lists from the company telling where all these spies and polacks live, they’re as easy to bag as laundry. We nail ’em doing practically everything—sleeping, eating, playing cards, taking a leak, and having a piece of nooky—and there’s scared ones and sore ones and boiling-mad ones and here and there a nut that shows fight, but one and all we roust ’em out, and by sun-up there’s twelve hundred strikers locked in boxcars on the Espee. Meanwhile we sew up th
e operators at Bell Phone and Western Union, and up to the time we hook an engine onto that haul and pull out for New Mexico, there still ain’t been a peep to the outside world. Most of us deputies ride the train too, and all the way to Columbus it’s a picnic, bug-juice and all. At Columbus, though, they don’t let us dump our freight, so we have to back out onto the desert again to a switch called Hermanas, and there we open the doors and let the strikers fall out. One of’em has to be helped account of he’s been dead for two days, and the rest is as good as dead with thirst, and they were pewey till hell wouldn’t have it. There ain’t much strike left in the sons-of-bitches, but we still don’t want ’em in Bisbee, so we leave ’em there in the mesquite and ride back on top of the empties, and I’m here to tell you them roofs is hotter than the devil’s crotch.”

  The car was out of the canyon now, and its rubber on the gummy road of the mesa made a sound like fat frying. Far ahead, where a rise went up against the sky, the buck brush and scrub oak seemed to be standing in running water, and straight north, over a bullet-punctured marker reading TOMBSTONE—11, was a long dark range, the Blue Dragoons.

  “Here’s a good place,” the man said, and turning the car around toward town, he stepped on the brake. “Out.”

  From the sand shoulder, Dan said, “The Bisbee Deportations.”

  “Good name for that party, no?” the man said, and then he paused. “Thought you said you was only eight back in ’17.”

  “Things get written down,” Dan said. “The words are piling up against you, you know that? They’re as high as your chin right now, and they’re getting higher all the time.”

  It took a moment for the man’s cold stare to thaw into a grin. “Talk about your Consatution!” he said, and he drove away.

  Dan walked toward the running water in the distance.

  LETTER FROM EL CENTRO

  My address for the summer will be the Imperial Valley Times. They looked at me kind of orry-eyed when I put in for the job, but so far it hasn’t been too tough, even for a greenhorn like me: the worst we’ve had was 105 in the shade. In July and August, though, when the ice breaks up, they tell me it gets a bit warmer here in the Sink—around 130 or so—and that’s when guys start to kill each other for a drink of nice cold blood.

  “I live in a building, and that’s about all I can say for the dump. It’s got a hall down the middle and five flats on either side, with one toilet for all. Each flat is a room and a screened porch, and they get so cool at night that you can’t boil coffee by putting the pot on the floor, like in the daytime, when the women have to keep their lip-sticks in the icebox. Cigarettes you light by striking them on the wall, like matches.

  “The Spaniards called Imperial Valley las palmas de Dios, meaning the hollow of God’s hand. I wonder what the hollow of His heart is like.

  “Well, enough about the weather.…”

  BOX-CARS ON THE ESPEE

  “What’re they handling out—free rides?”

  [In the El Centro yards, you’d caught a northbound Fruit Dispatch and ridden it through miles of citrus set in quincunx, and from the roof of the reefer, the orchards had looked as if they were spinning away as you passed, and there had been miles of hooded melons, miles of grapevine, and miles of up right cane in the straight ditches. At Indio, the power had paused for water, and, full, it’d barked twice and begun to pound for Palm Springs. As the crummy cleared the yard-end, a man had broken from behind a stack of ties and hooked your car on the fly. Coming up eye-high to the catwalk, he’d looked both ways for shacks, and seeing none, he’d climbed out of the gap, blanket-roll and all, and squatted next to you.] “Search me,” Dan said. “I’ve been sitting here since El Centro.”

  The man said, “The Espee ain’t what she used to was when Stanford run it. The old days, the shacks’d pick you off from the clown-wagon with an air-rifle. Where you heading?”

  “Any old place.”

  “What was you doing in El Centro, bunghole of the world?”

  “Working.”

  “What at—fruit?”

  “I had a job in an office,” Dan said. “Are you a fruit-stiff?”

  “Me? Don’t talk like a man in a paper hat! Something I don’t believe in: work.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  “Not working. Barring time in the phrigging infantry, I ain’t done a lick in twenty years.”

  “That’s a record.”

  “Nowheres near it, but I ain’t even begin to not work yet. As long as I got my strength, I’m going to not work.”

  “How’re you going to get by?” Dan said.

  “You must think you’re talking to Happy Hooligan. Take another look. I ain’t ganted up none, and my shirt’s cleaner than yours.”

  “What would you call yourself—a hobo?”

  “Hell, no. A hobo’ll beg when he can’t get work. Meaning he don’t draw the line at work.”

  “How about a tramp?”

  The man shook his head. “A tramp’ll work when he can’t beg,” he said, “and a straight-out beggar’ll work at his beggarly game like it was a trade. Keep reglar hours. Stash dough in the bank. Live in one place, mostly, and die there. A citizen, he thinks he is, a businessman. It’s hard to put a handle on what I am. I do pretty much like you. Move around when I want, see places, get the feel of the world—only I don’t work at it.…”

  [You shook him in the Glendale yards when they broke up the train, and spotting some high cars behind a ready Mikado, you waited along the right-of-way and boosted yourself into an open empty when the power dragged it past. There was little left of the afternoon by the time the haul took on a pusher for the Saugus Grade, and it was long dark when the head-end made the Tehachapi Summit and dug in for the four-thousand-foot drop into the San Joaquin. You slept then, and in the sleep you had a dream of Julia Davis: that was all you remembered of it, the name; nothing else was with you when you woke, only the name. At dawn, in Merced, the freight took a side-rail to let some varnish pass, and you swung off to feed; when you came back, the man with the blanket-roll was waiting for you, and you said] “I thought I beat you out of L.A.”

  “You did,” the man said. “By about thirty cars.”

  “I just tied on the nose-bag. You eat?”

  “I always eat. Where’s the trick in eating?”

  “The trick’s in paying. Ever hear of the crapitalistic system?”

  “Beaucoup,” the man said, “and it’s a beaut.”

  “It’s a beaut for sons-of-bitches.”

  “You’re running down my favorite people.”

  “We’re not theirs. They only love two things, and both of them are money.”

  “God forbid it should be otherwise.”

  “How does that get us in out of the rain?”

  “You just don’t catch on,” the man said. “The more they have, the more they sweat, and when they sweat, they shell out—two bits here, two bits there, it all adds up. The shelling-out’s insurance.”

  “Against what?” Dan said.

  “God, luck, revolution—anything that might yank ’em off the pot. There ain’t nobody with a wad that ain’t scared pissyassed. We trade on that.”

  “How?” Dan said. “Suppose you asked a guy for a handout, and he spit in your eye. What could you do about it?”

  “Nothing,” the man said, “but he don’t know that. If he’s a psalm-singer, he worries God’ll punish him. If he’s a common-sense guy, he figures you might just get sore enough to tell the papers. If he’s got the superstish, he don’t want no Indian-sign on him. You never seen nobody spit in a bum’s eye, and you never will. The thing that gives us the willies is just the opposite: if people start loving us. They might want to give us a job, and then we’re up the creek. We don’t want to change nothing. Let the bastards own everything and run the world—just so we eat what they pay for.”

  “How about when you get too old to be frightening?”

  “Old!” the man said. “You say that like you’r
e trying to faze me with it. Why, I can’t hardly wait to get old! A bum does his best bumming in a white beard, but show me the working-stiff that looks forward to his sixties. That’s just when the boss tosses him out on his skinny prat.…”

  [You lost him for good at Lathrop when you pointed yourself west. You camped on the near side of the river, and as a bay-bound freight slowed down to take the trestle, you pitched your satchel onto a flat and grabbed the rungs. Three hours later, with the sun in the Gate (the loco-smoke was purple, and the cougar hills were lilac), the haul nosed into the Espee yards on the Oakland Mole.]

  A MAN NAME OF JAMES WILSON MARSHALL

  Ata California, the Mexicans called it. [You’d climbed Twin Peaks and looked out over the sloping city, your eyes swinging from Tamalpais in Marin to the stringy sloughs at the south end of the bay, and then they’d swung back, seeing more this time, seeing the near and the far—the near Carquinez and the far Donner Pass.…]

  Alta California—and in Alta California lived the richest man in the world. A Switzer from Basle, he was, a kind of a Dutchman, and all Dutchmen being queer as cats, when he first set foot on Yerba Buena, he was backed up by a bodyguard of Kanakas, a gift from the King of the Sandwich Isles. If he owned anything else at the time, this Switzer, he kept it hid under his hat.

  It wasn’t long, though, before no hat but God’s would’ve covered his plunder. He made a hit with Governor Alvarado and came off with a grant-deed to a piece of dirt twenty-two hours square up along the Sacramento. The metes and bounds being given by the clock, he was free to step off the four sides of his plot any which-way he liked: he could’ve walked it, run it, crawled it pushing a pebble, or galloped it on a relay of horses for eighty-eight hours, which last would’ve marked him out some seventy million acres, give or take a county—but he never even took the trouble to drive a corner-post.