The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  The three canteen cooks came out into the road. The last maker’s son with plastic shavings in his hair like garlands, no more than sixteen, timidly approached.

  “Alex.” Ivy’s voice. I raised my eyes. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  “She was here a moment ago,” I said. I lifted my head, but no one was on the roof, just the dull aching sky.

  Kneeling beside me, Ivy slowly turned Ruxi over onto her back. She pressed two fingers against Ruxi’s neck, feeling for life under the skin.

  “Nothing,” Ivy said.

  I looked at Ruxi. A livid, deep purple contusion ran from her cheek up to the corner of her eye. Caved in. Her forearms skinned, pavement grit sparkled inside her palms. Abrasions along her legs. Knees grated. I heard myself groan.

  One of Ruxi’s sandals had blown off on impact. I saw it a few feet away and rushed to retrieve it. One of ours. Soft Atanado. I’d hated this sandal, but Dad wouldn’t listen. I said let’s do all-over black. This color blocking, a garish Moroccan blue and fuchsia, I told Dad, it was screaming.

  Now I took Ruxi’s foot in my hand.

  “What are you doing?” Ivy asked. She shook my shoulders. I needed her hands back the instant they were gone.

  Carefully, I slipped Ruxi’s big toe into the toe-loop and nestled her foot on the midsole, pulled the strap up over her ankle.

  “They are coming,” Ivy said. The workers. I heard their footsteps before I saw them, streaming out of every door, hundreds, gathering, pressing, in a circle around us, ten deep, in tattered trousers, jeans, overalls, high on shoe cement. Crying, shouting, fanning themselves.

  The head of security, Longwei, prim and buttoned, pushed his way to the middle. Thin as a sliver of soap. He released the catch on his polished pistol, aimed it at the sky and fired one round, its leaden echo rolling.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said, leaping up from the ground.

  “I don’t want a riot,” he said in English.

  “Don’t shoot again,” I said, struggling to get a full breath. “You can’t.”

  Over his shoulder, I saw Dad standing a few yards off, his hands up by his ears, like a kid at a horror movie, and I waved him over. He squeezed through the crowd and when he saw Ruxi, he put a chilled hand on my elbow and squeezed.

  “My God,” he said. He was sweating.

  I told Longwei to order the crowd to give us room. Longwei holstered his pistol and yelled at the workers in Chinese. But no one left. The workers closed in. They were pushing.

  “Longwei,” I said, “tell them to go back to the dorms.”

  “They do not listen, Mr. Younger Cohen. I use the tear gas now.”

  He pulled out a gray metal canister and curled his trigger finger around the pin.

  “No,” I said. “God, no. You’ll start a riot.”

  I saw Hongjin holding the workers back with his arms spread. They were trying to get to Ruxi’s body. To see. I knelt back down beside Ivy.

  “I better call the police,” I said to her.

  “No,” she said, “They will cremate her. The police will. Her body needs to go home. Or she wanders forever.”

  Ruxi’s hair was fanned out like duckweed, slick with blood. Long shadows over her body. I kept staring at her like she’d quit being dead, sit up straight and talk.

  “Alex,” Ivy whispered. “I can help. I can calm them down. But you need to help me too.”

  “Anything,” I said.

  She dragged her fingers over Ruxi’s eyes, then stood up and holding her arms over her head yelled in Chinese and the crowd slowly backed off.

  “We have to move her,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Dad asked. Eyes wide and spooked. “Let’s call the police.”

  “No police. They’ll shut us down for a week,” I said, and that could’ve been true, but I wasn’t really thinking about the factory. I needed to make this right. And the only chance that Ruxi got back to her parents was if we sent her. But we couldn’t just carry her body upstairs. Or we could, but I didn’t want anyone else to see her this way. She needed to be covered.

  I told Dad to stay put and ran to the finishing plant. The bay door opened to a scrim of leather dust and mold stench. I was looking for something: a stretcher, a cart, folding table, even a tarp. Nothing. Only cut sides. My eye fell on a pallet of full hides in the corner. I carried one out as Longwei and Hongjin were leading the workers back to the dorms.

  “What are you doing?” Dad asked when he saw the hide. I knew he was about to say, That’s a fifty-dollar hide you’ll ruin. His lips parted. I glared at him and he made a husky cough deep in his throat.

  “Help,” I said to Ivy. We unrolled the dark brown hide across the pavement, the corners curled stiff. I could see the scars along the neck where the spooked steer had cut himself on barbed wire trying to escape the pen.

  The guards were preoccupied and Dad was still nailed to the spot. I turned to Ivy.

  “Grab her legs.”

  She reached for Ruxi’s ankles. I was up by her head, but her hands were too limp for me to get a firm hold, so I squatted down and grabbed her forearms. I paused for a second. “Will the workers talk to the police?” I asked Ivy.

  She shook her head. “Never. They are terrified of police. They don’t trust.”

  The moment we lifted Ruxi off the ground, her head flopped back and she was staring at me upside down, her face as calm as a child, but then her mouth opened, baring her teeth, and now all I saw in her face was agony, this silent scream.

  We set her down on the leather and started rolling her into the hide. It was hideous how easily she turned over. I half closed my eyes until she was enveloped, only her feet poking out the bottom and a fist of black hair that crept out the top.

  “We’ll carry her to the office,” I said, and I saw Hongjin running back from the dorms. I shouted to him to clear the way. Dad was standing still, rooted to the spot. Ivy and I lifted Ruxi. We brought her slowly, in short choppy steps, to the elevator, then up to the third floor. I walked backward, looking over my shoulder. Ivy staggered forward telling me to slow down, but my wrists were burning. Hers too, I was sure. The hide loosened with every step, just needed it to hold a little longer, down this hall a bit farther.

  “Where?” Ivy said. She was breathing hard.

  “Conference room,” I panted. It was the only table big enough. “Don’t drop her.” Hongjin pushed open the door, and we laid her down.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Go check on the workers,” I told Hongjin, who was clearly in shock. He left without responding.

  Ivy wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Then she lightly touched the bolt of Ruxi’s hair dangling out of the end of the rolled leather hide. “Do you think she knows she’s dead?” Ivy said.

  I told her I didn’t know. When I saw Ruxi’s face, it seemed that she was aware of it all. That she kept on feeling. From the hallway came the scuff of footsteps on linoleum. Maybe it was Dad. Or more guards. Ivy lifted her eyes to mine and I felt the darkness of her look run right through me. “Hide her,” she said. “If the police find her, they will cremate her. Make up a story in the news. Cover this up. We can’t trust them to send her home to her family and admit the truth. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  Ivy squeezed my hand and in a low voice said, “I have to see you tonight.”

  7

  I PEEKED OUT the door. Hallway to my left—a clear shot down to the makeshift churrascaria kitchen that Yong had installed last year. Time to make a move before anyone showed up. Not daring to take her out of the leather shroud, I edged Ruxi off the table into my arms, her body already stiff from rigor mortis, so it was like carrying lumber.

  I ferried her to the low chest freezer in the kitchen. With my pinky outstretched, I lifted open the cover. A rush of cold water vapor chuff
ed up around my face, this thick milky fog, and suddenly I couldn’t see my own arms in front of my face, like I was the one who was dead and there was no peach garden, no World to Come, only this gray miasma, ringlets of smoke, but when the murk cleared there were forearms, mine, emerging sharply, and Ruxi’s shroud, and the plastic baggies of beef ribs, chicken hearts, wings, shoulders, rumps, livers, tongues, all sparkling with ice crystals—everything finding its shape again.

  I took a deep breath and set her down on top of the bags. I was about to close the lid and beat it out of there when I tripped over this thought. The Buddhists say consciousness stays with the body for three days, so even though Ruxi’s eyes were closed and she was all wrapped up, maybe she saw me. Maybe she was in there watching.

  Out loud I told her I was sorry. It was my fault after all. If I’d been a little bit smarter or luckier, I could’ve prevented it.

  Still, that was pretty weak comfort coming from someone who was about to hide you in an ice chest. All I knew was that I wasn’t feeling right anymore. Not with the factory or my job or the heat. Not anything. I slammed the lid over her and it cut off the steam to my head and everything was almost back to normal.

  I headed back down the hall and sat at my desk, my back to the view of the roof where Ruxi jumped, wondering why? For what? What did that accomplish, her jumping? I told myself not to waste another minute thinking about the past or what could’ve been. What’s done was done. It wasn’t my fault.

  That’s what Trotsky basically told my grandfather at the Triangle Diner in the Bronx when Zayde kept calling him Lev Bronstein, his real name, and Trotsky flicked the peak of his wool Budenovka hat, saying, “It’s Trotsky now,” no anger in his voice, like the revolution burned the Jew right out of him. Zayde didn’t let up; he was probably eating his stewed prunes like he did every morning and kept pushing. The Talmud says there are three kinds of tears, those caused by smoke, grief and constipation. We’re a family of pushers. So Zayde pressed him on which Russians he’d save in the end: the workers or the Jews, and Trotsky took off his steel pince-nez, his eyes real blue, like the flame of a gas range burner, a wolfish diamond face, and he said real calmly, “Comrade, I am a Marxist. This skin isn’t my fault.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Zayde asked. “What about Kishinev? The Black Hundreds?”

  “The final triumph of communism will solve that,” said Trotsky.

  Zayde spluttered, “Here in America, hotshot, if you haven’t noticed, here we have the vote!”

  “Who’s we?” Trotsky said and he reached for the check under his coffee mug, but Zayde grabbed it saying he wouldn’t let Trotsky demean the laboring class by paying for a hot meal.

  I was thinking all this through as I took the stairs down to the canteen. Thinking like Trotsky. This skin wasn’t my fault. Which made me feel better. The fact was that some shoes failed inspection, some hands got chewed up by the fleshing machines, and some Chinese girls in summer dresses fell from the sky on a clear bright day. You couldn’t know why. Trotsky would tell me that the sooner you accept who you are, the sooner you’d get your shit together.

  I pushed open the steel door, and the warm air from the street hit my face like a wet mop and seared my lungs.

  But a little doubt rolled into me. What did I have to do with anything if some invisible hand was moving us around? If Ruxi’s death wasn’t connected to me, that left what? This mystery crouching in the center of our lives. I just didn’t want to be a shitbum, a nothing—that’s what I feared more than anything, the torment of being ordinary.

  I smelled the brick kiln behind our factory, the air redolent of sweet burned blue clay. It was a good smell. Sitting on the bench outside of Plant B was Die Jo of all people, the former foot model, smacking a pack of King’s against the heel of her wrist. She smiled at me politely and I could see her lips moving, her eyes lifted on the diagonal, like she was rehearsing a line, and she said, “Hello, sugar. Hello, trouble.” The words came out slow like she was reading off a teleprompter.

  I said hello.

  “Big Sleep,” she said.

  I thought she was talking about Ruxi, but maybe she meant the movie.

  “No police. I shut the clam door for you, doll,” she said and winked, making it clear which one she meant.

  Then she took off her black cloth shoes and pushed them under the bench and put her bare feet down on the pavement that was wet and cool. Before lunch I always saw the janitor out here watering the flagstones. I thought he was crazy for that, an old man in a blue jumper who watered the pavement. But now I saw that he did it for Die Jo. A kindness. So she could enjoy a post-lunch smoke with her shoes off, feet firm on the ground, smooth and slender, the nails painted maroon. She cared for them. And she had the janitor keeping them cool on these blistering days when you wanted to step in a gallon of ice cream to stop your skin from boiling.

  I gave her a curt wave and she held her arm up elegantly like she was waving goodbye with a handkerchief, and it seemed smug, like she was really saying, “You’re in over your head. You don’t know shit about us.”

  * * *

  That evening, Dad and I drove in silence back to the hotel. From his fanny pack, he found by touch a tube of some lotion and squeezed a dollop in his palm and rubbed it on his face meticulously, in small circles with his fingers. I figured it was sunscreen, one last application to cover his ass all ten feet from the van into the hotel lobby.

  It was 7:00 p.m. by the time we got back, and he said he was going to sack out early, get room service, something he only did when he was real sick.

  “Bad day,” he said. “Twenty years in China. Right after Nixon, and that was my first jumper.”

  That made my eye twitch. A jumper. I thought he was going to say something else, but he sighed, took a hesitant step in the direction of Karri’s empty desk and then pivoted back, like all of a sudden he wanted a hug.

  But he stopped just short of my reach. He cleared his throat. Okay, I thought, here it comes. Something weighty. Finally some honesty.

  “How’s my T-zone?” he asked.

  “Your what?”

  “My face.” He pulled the sunscreen tube out of his fanny pack. “This crap Karri gave me. Antiaging cream.” He stared at me impatiently. “It’s technically a serum,” he clarified, like I’d challenged him.

  “The ginseng tightens you up. Depuffs. Do I look depuffed?”

  I was about ready to pick him up and throw him into the elevator. I wanted to say: I give a fuck about your T-zone?

  Turning the tube over, he read from the back. “Summer glow my ass. Am I glowing?”

  I took a good hard look. Usually I tried not to look at him too long or too directly, like he was some kind of gorgon. I mean, every father is his son’s creation—that’s our only revenge. But this time I forced myself to look—his skin sagging around his face and neck, red and flaky, hair gone gray.

  He took a step closer, right up on me now. He was not a close talker, so I was thinking it was awkward hug time, and right then it hit me that all his controlling and bossiness were meant to hide the simple fact he was terrified of the storm just outside his door.

  This memory swept over me of going with him as a kid to Yugoslavia to liquidate his factories. My first get-your-shit-together trip, back when I thought I’d make a living selling my Bo Jackson posterboard collages or live on a mountain breeding angora rabbits, anything so long as it didn’t involve shoes. Back before I realized you had to choose a path or risk becoming nothing.

  We’d left Bugojno driving east through farmland toward the airport in Belgrade when we’d hit a checkpoint. A bearded soldier in black fatigues and a beret tapped the car window with the muzzle of his AK-47 and, pressing the gun to my father’s temple, ordered us to get out of the car and lie down in the road.

  I remember lying with my cheek in the dirt, my eyes facing a grove of p
ear trees sparkling with green glass bottles. It was bright out, the sun singed my neck, and I saw all those glinting bottles roosting in the trees like grackles, and I realized suddenly how they got the pears inside the bottles of Kruska, the strong-ass brandy that made me throw up my lamb the night before. I’d thought for sure they blew the glass around the pear, I mean I spent all night thinking about how they got the goddamn pear into the bottle, but now it was very obvious that they slid the glass over the tiny bud and the pear grew inside the bottle’s chest like an embryo, cell by cell, until it ripened.

  I don’t remember the bearded soldier stabbing the car seats or Dad forking over the bribe money that finally got us out of there. Only the glass pear tree and reaching over to take Dad’s hand. He always said too much touching and I wouldn’t turn out right, like raising a kid was the same as making Baked Alaska—the last thing you want to have to do is chuck it and start over. On the ground, he whispered, “You okay, Bagel?” That’s what he called me at home. Bagel-boy. I hated the name. I was doing my best—everything short of wearing a gold chain crucifix—to pretend I wasn’t Jewish. But the moment Dad said Bagel-boy outside Bugojno, I knew it was less of a name than a wish. He needed me. I inched my arm over and squeezed his hand to let him know I was there and at least we’d be shot and thrown into the Sava river together.

  And I couldn’t shake that feeling again, here in the hotel lobby—that I was supposed to be his father, that God got it all flipped around. So I placed my hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and there was a lot of muscle packed in those shoulders, like my own.

  The moment I touched him, Dad’s chin dropped to his chest and he exhaled, a puff of prune juice on my face, like the jammy Slivovitz on the mouth of the bearded soldier lifting me off the ground by my armpits as the piss dribbled out of my pant leg and made a puddle in the dirt.

  I thought Dad was about to start crying. He swiped at his nose with the back of his wrist, and I let my arm fall from his shoulder.