A Man Without Shoes
Page 50
Julie slid off the pile of ties, saying, “Piss on you, Mr. Accident-arranger!”
“I remember just one more thing,” the timekeeper said, “Whenever people talked about the accident, they always called it ‘The Backhouse Barbecue.’ Well, I got to get on with my weed-chopping.”
Julie watched the man walk away, and waiting for him to reach the crowd at the tower, he said to Dan, “I got to answer a call of Nature.”
Dan rose, saying, “Me too.”
Julie brought him to a stop with one finger. “I don’t need any witnesses, boy,” he said, and he started for the shanty with the white door.
The crowd was no longer sloped against a wall, straddling rail, or blessing a fire with open hands: the hands of all were fists. Dan ran after Julie and caught his arm. “For Christ’s sake, don’t go in there!” he said.
His face slowly growing contempt, Julie shook him off, saying, “Looks like you’re just a trouble-hater too, Danny.”
And then the white door opened, and the white door closed.
[Now, in this fraction of a moment between repose and action—suppose!
[Suppose they came, the white mob with the black heart, and suppose they had boards to bar the shack with, and suppose they had a tin of kerosene and a car-mop doused in engine-oil, and suppose a match.
[And suppose you stood between the white door and the whites, saying, “Take it easy, boys.”
[And suppose they said, “Do you move, or do we move you?” [And suppose you said, “One of you goes where I go. Come on, Big Train.”
[And suppose they came on. [And suppose you went for the blue-eyed guy, the blond, the athlete, the yellow-haired Indian-killing Custer, the collar-ad model, the cop, the open-shopper, the acted-on go-getter, the hangman, the proud and poorly-paid lickass, the defender of the faithless, the known quantity, the X exposed (weight 190, with or without head), the winnah and noo champeen, the American answer to the American dream—and suppose you put all your hatred into one cocked fist and flung it.
[And suppose the Big Train still came on—the U.S.A., big, hard, dumb, and fast—and suppose it ran you down, jumped your guts, kicked your nuts up back of your lungs, broke your bones, bled you, and desecrated the graves that once had held your eyes.
[And suppose you were as good as dead, and suppose in your remaining moment you learned what you hadn’t learned in all the rest of your time on earth: that it was a pity to waste your life trying to die of old age when you could use it helping people to live forever. And suppose you thought once more of the tall thin man with a bullet in his brain, and now suppose you had a second or two for one last suppose—and you supposed it. Suppose you’d only been supposing. Suppose your fine final thoughts had never been thought….
[AND SUPPOSE, INSTEAD, THAT YOU’D RUN AWAY!]
Again the white door opened, and again the white door closed, and Julie was on the step, saying, “False alarm.”
The one-o’clock whistle blew.
HALF THE FUN OF HAVING FEET
“When I left the yards,” Dan said, “I walked along the docks toward Battery Park. I wanted to see the place where I was born—the place, not the house, because I knew that the house was gone, and with it the little stores, the gas-lamp in front, the overhead wires, and the people. I had to learn whether I’d left some trace of myself, some mark to show that I’d actually lived, some proof that the first half of my life was more than a recurrent dream in the second half. The place was a seven-hundred-foot monument, and buried under it were a few odds and ends that once had belonged to a nobody named Dan Johnson—a toy that he’d played with, a button from a shoe, initials carved in a banister, and a few drops of his blood—but the monument was dedicated to an oil-company, a stock-corporation, a legal fiction, not to me. Where the school had been, there was no monument at all—nothing but an empty lot littered with broken brick and bits of plaster, a filled-in hole, a potter’s field holding more of the nobody that all but I had forgotten and none but I would ever look for. The written monuments, I thought—would there be words anywhere to recover what I’d lost? A birth-certificate, a census-report, a high-school record—but I knew that those would show only a date, a dead address, and a grade in Algebra, numbers on yellowing paper, information that wouldn’t inform—and I thought, Christ, is that all there is of your life, a few meaningless facts in a file? Has your time on earth been time alone, with a start and a finish and all in between thrown away? Christ, I thought, Jesus Christ, you’ve chewed yourself out, like a stick of gum, and stuck the remains under a chair!”
“Don’t hate yourself any more, Dan,” Mary said. “If you have to hate, hate the people that hate people, but for God’s sake, don’t hate one of the few that love them.”
“I won’t hate myself for long—only another twelve hours,” he said, and from her sudden abatement, as if her existence had suffered an intermission, he knew that she apprehended the rest. “Give me till morning, Mary, and I’ll sign up for Spain.” With the word Spain, her main hope, long-condemned, seemed to buckle and give way. “I’d’ve signed today, but by the time I discovered where to go, the office was closed [You’d sign tomorrow, you thought, and the great deed—the one that undone had all your life dulled your living—would be performed. You’d sign tomorrow, you thought, and then the gray road would whiten and the gray years shine. Tomorrow, you thought.…]—so give me one more night to hate, Mary, and that’ll end it.”
She spoke in a low voice, as if it were almost too late to speak at all, and like one of many at some enviable departure—a sailing, a wedding-journey, a going-home—she said, “You told me once to make no plans….”
He said, “I’m going to Spain because I have to put a stop to my cowardice with an act. I can’t stop it with thought, and I can’t let time stop it with old age and death. I have to perform! If there were some limit to cowardice, if it had a cycle, an orbit, a quota, a maximum size and weight, I think I might’ve endured it, but I learned today that it’s a lingering illness, and that from nothing it’ll grow till it’s all. It was huge before, but this afternoon, when I realized that I’d’ve thrown Julie to the wolves—when my feet stood their ground, and my mind ran away—it became world-wide, sky-high, and lifelong. That’s why I’m going to Spain—to end the running or, failing that, to end myself. I’m the running kind, Mary, but if I run in Spain, they won’t let me off with scorn, as Julie did: they’ll shoot me in the back!”
“Make no plans, you said, because you wanted to be free to make your own—but what are your own, Dan? Have you thought about them much, or did they come to you in a dream—and are they plans at all, except the sort a man makes when he draws a will? What you mean to do is end a quiet and useful life with a loud and useless death, but you have no right to call that a plan for anything more than more running, this time till you fall down and die either in disgrace or as a hero—no matter which, just so you die. Don’t make any plans, you warned me, and none were made, but I still and I’ll always hold you to the one thing I demanded in return: you were not to make your great deed death; you were to fight if you so desired, but you were not to die unless only your dying would win what you were fighting for. You’re not going to Spain to win anything but a pass. You’re not going for Flo and her people, for Sacco and Vanzetti, for Marse Linkum and John Brown, for your dead Michele that you call Miguel, or because your mind ran away with you in Florida once and again this afternoon. You’re going for yourself, and by standing on everything around you—on your dead idols, your living friends, and your wife—you hope to grow tall. You won’t, Dan, because Spain for you is a place to end, not to begin. You won’t find what you’re looking for in Spain any more than you found it under a forty-story building or the trash in a vacant lot. You won’t find it anywhere in the world but right in this room—in you, in Dan Johnson, in Mig’s Mr. Lovejoy. If it isn’t here, it doesn’t exist. If it is, you can stop eating your heart out, because some day your great deed will be done—and in Americ
a!”
He reached for her hand and held it for a moment, idly turning her ring, and then he said, “If I don’t go, I’ll always think I was afraid.”
“And if you do, I’ll always think you were afraid to stay,” she said. “This is where the fear began, and this is where you have to cure it—and do you know why, Dan? Because it’s the Forty-Eighter that you’re in love with—not yourself, your friends, great men, Spain, or me.” And now, like a stained-glass window in a momentary beam, her face measured out to him its grave and temperate beauty, and she said, “I won’t mind so much. I’ll take what she leaves if you stay.”
He raised his eyes to her, and when at length he nodded, briefly and once only, she was unable to look upon the ordeal of yielding, and turning away, she wept in silence while he spoke—to her, to the darkening room, to the city and its band of rivers, to the land beyond, and to vivid lines on a fading chart—saying, “I love it, Mary, I love it all, but I’d love it more if I could make it better. I’ll try to, Mary. I’ll do what I can.…”
A Note on the Author
John B. Sanford was born Julian Lawrence Shapiro in Harlem, New York in 1904 to Jewish parents; his father was a Russian immigrant and his mother a first-generation American. His mother died in 1914 when he was only 10, which would have a marked influence on his life.
A graduate of Lafayette College, Shapiro later studied law at Fordham University; after graduation he decided to follow the example of his childhood friend, Nathanael West, and concentrate on his writing.
In the summer of 1931, isolated in a log cabin in the Adirondacks, he finished his first novel, The Water Wheel. When Shapiro was close to publishing his second book, The Old Man’s Place, West (born Weinstein), suggested he change his name to one less identifiably Jewish, for fear of anti-Semitism damaging book sales. Shapiro became Sanford, and in 1935 the success of The Old Man’s Place allowed him to move to Hollywood to try his hand as a screenwriter.
In 1936, Sanford was hired by Paramount Pictures, where he met his future wife Marguerite Roberts, also a screenwriter. In the same year, he became involved in the Communist Party of the United States – Roberts became a member after meeting Sanford, but was to hand her card back in 1947. Nevertheless they were both called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where they refused to give their names, invoking the Fifth Amendment. Along with many other Hollywood professionals, both Sanford and Roberts were blacklisted between 1951 and 1962, which effectively ended their Hollywood careers.
Sanford wrote half of his books after the age of 80; his 5-volume autobiography earned him a PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Lifetime Achievement Award. He left three unpublished novels and was still writing up until a month before his death at 98 in 2003.
Discover books by John Sanford published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnSanford
A Man without Shoes
A Palace of Silver
Maggie: A Love Story
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
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This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
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First published in 1951 by The Plantin Press, Los Angeles
Copyright © 1951 John Sanford
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eISBN: 9781448213252
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