A Man Without Shoes Read online

  “He’s all right,” the hack-driver said. “Leave him alone.”

  “He’s never acted like this. He wouldn’t nurse before.”

  “The kid’s a weasel. He just wants you to pick him up and rock him. He found out he’s got a voice, but why should we let him find out we can hear it? All kids are weasels.”

  The woman said, “I want you to go up to the corner and phone the doctor.”

  “Doctor! Who says we need a doctor? You’re frazzling yourself over nothing, Polly. The kid’s probably got a bellyache.”

  “I don’t know what he’s got, but he’s got something, and he’s going to have a doctor.”

  The hack-driver took his cap from a wall-rack. “If you say doctor, it’s doctor,” he said. “But first, give me a kiss.”

  “When you come back,” the woman said.

  “Now.”

  “All right. Now.”

  Half an hour later, the child was laid bridging and boxing on a quilt covering the kitchen table, and the doctor began his examination. He searched a crying mouth, he rolled back small eyelids, and gently he tapped a blown-out chest and a deflated belly—but he said nothing. He took a roman-numbered watch from a secret pocket at his belt, he two-fingered the child’s pulse, and he timed it for thirty seconds—but he said nothing. He snapped the spinal-fluid of a thermometer down to 98, pressed the bulb deep into the child’s rectum, and then glanced about the room, his eyes pausing at the doorway, through which were visible a buckhorn hatrack, a Pluto Water calendar, and a map of the United States—but he said nothing. Turning again to the child, he withdrew the thermometer and rotated it until its core became visible, but only after cleansing the instrument in alcohol did he look up at the disquieted parents. “He’s constipated,” he said.

  Education

  The hack-driver entered the flat, saying, “I’m home, Polly,” and as he passed into the bedroom, his foot struck a small piece of furniture standing just within the door. “Hey,” he said, “what’s this?”

  “What’s what?” the woman said, emerging from the kitchen with a milk-bottle.

  “This thing here with the hole in it.”

  The woman squirted a drop of milk on her wrist. “What does it look like?”

  “If you want to know, a toilet on wheels.”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “I’ll be damned. How does it work?”

  Elbowing her husband out of the way, the woman went to the bed, undiapered the child, and sat him over the open manhole of the toy-toilet. Then she turned down a flap to keep him in place, and while he laid about him with a dented tin cup, she fed him from the tilted bottle.

  “Quite an invention,” the hack-driver said. “What’s supposed to happen now?”

  “He’s supposed to have a movement.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Certainly he knows it,” the woman said.

  “He don’t look like he knows a horse-collar from wild honey.”

  “He knows a lot more than you think. Go wash your hands and get ready for supper.”

  “What do you call that contraption?”

  “A potty-chair,” the woman said.

  “Good God!” the hack-driver said. “A name like that could bind him like cheese. It’d bind me”

  “Oh, go wash your hands. You look as if you’re wearing gloves.”

  “Polly,” the hack-driver said, “when you were a little girl, and you had to do something, what did you use to say?”

  “I said, ‘I have to make Number One.’ ”

  “I said, ‘I have to pee.’”

  “One of the girls at school was very elegant. She always said, ‘I have to make A Wish.’”

  “Sometimes I didn’t say a word,” the hack-driver said. “I just peed.”

  “This is fine talk, Dan.”

  “What did you use to say when you had to do the other thing?”

  “I’m going to make a prediction,” the woman said. “This child’s first word is going to be a dirty one.”

  “Potty-chair! Could anything be dirtier than that?”

  The woman handed him the empty bottle, saying, “Put this in the kitchen,” and then she lifted the child from under the chair-flap.

  “Any luck?” the hack-driver said.

  “No.”

  “I guess he didn’t get the idea.”

  The woman placed the child in the crib, and after rediapering him, she took the bottle from the hack-driver’s hand and left the room. He remained where he was, watching his son.

  “Danny,” he said. “Little Danny-boy.”

  The child’s face suddenly rouged itself, his body became rigid, and a look of great thoughtfulness invaded his eyes. Then, as suddenly as the tension had begun, it was gone, and the child resumed his aimless kicking and punching. The hack-driver reached out, hefted the diaper, and smiled.

  “You weasel,” he said. “Oh, Polly … !”

  Languages

  The woman, on a stool near a sewing-table, slid a wooden darning-egg into a small stocking and began to mend an abrasion in the knee. Crawling at her feet, her son pushed a toy engine, stepped-on and sprung, along a pair of lines in the design of the rug. The hack-driver stood with his back to the map, his attention fixed on a guest seated in a chair cocked against a wall: the guest was his wife’s brother, Webster Varner. A cigar trapped in the man’s teeth had packed the room with smoke, a filler for all but the hot pillar of air above the hanging gas-jet.

  “Well, Web…,” the hack-driver said.

  “Well, what?” Varner said, and taking the cigar from his mouth, he blew on the red coal and blustered it up to orange. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything you’ve done since the last time you were here.”

  “All that for a meal and a nickel stogie?”

  “The whole turkey-shoot,” the hack-driver said.

  “I wouldn’t tell it all to the Pope if I was a monk.”

  “Leave out the part with garters.”

  “There wouldn’t be much left,” the woman said. “Web, when’re you going to light on something and stay there?”

  “I lit thirty years ago,” Varner said, “and the thing I lit on was moving.”

  “You’re more Dan’s brother than mine,” the woman said. “If God told my husband he could have one wish, I think he’d say, ‘Lord, make me the cow-catcher on a locomotive!’”

  “A man moves even when he thinks he’s standing still,” Varner said. “He’s on a trolley-car that goes around the sun once a year.”

  “He doesn’t have to run up and down the aisle, though,” the woman said. “He can take a seat.”

  “I’ve got an itchy behind,” Varner said.

  “Me, I itch all over,” the hack-driver said, “but not being my own master any more, I ain’t allowed to scratch.”

  “Listen to that,” the woman said. “Remember what Mom always said, Web? ‘A man’s a creature on a long tether.’”

  “But the point is, he’s tethered,” the hack-driver said.

  “It’s an imaginary rope, Dan,” the woman said. “If you want free, all you have to do is walk away.”

  “Well,” Varner said, “where should I start?”

  “The beginning’s as good a place as any,” the hack-driver said.

  Varner huffed up a noose of smoke that rolled inside-out and outside-in, struck the map, and unbraided. “I bummed clear to the Coast this time,” he said.

  The hack-driver’s gaze had followed the smoke-ring, and when it disintegrated, he found himself staring at the crayon sunburst on the right edge of the chart. The discoloration seemed to invite touch, but he placed a finger on it only to see his hand sweep slowly in a course that embraced all between the two oceans. “Clear to the Coast,” he heard himself say.

  “It’s a big country,” Varner said. “Godamighty, but it’s a big country!”

  “How’d you go?” the hack-driver said.

  “Right smack throug
h the middle,” Varner said. “The first half was easy: from here to Omaha, you can raise a ride while you lie under a tree. But out beyond, there’s damn few trees and damn few rides, and if Nebraska’s any criterion, damn few human beings. A stateful of hard-shells—the kind that can’t see a man on the road, but somehow manage to run over every cat and dog. It wasn’t the walking, though, that bothered me in Nebraska: it was what I had to walk on. One stretch, I remember, ran forty-five miles without a dip or a bend. The old straight-and-narrow, it was, and it only made me want to go crooked with a splash. I stuck it out as far as Grand Island. From there, I took to the rods and rode the U. P. to Julesburg.…”

  “Julesburg,” the hack-driver said, and he looked at a black dot in the northeastern corner of Colorado.

  “… And Denver,” Varner said. “I’d thought to stay there for a while, but Denver’s a town that doesn’t hold you: you find yourself washing your hands all the time. A week of it, and I was heading for Golden, where you start climbing the Rockies like a window-cleaner for two of the steepest thousand feet God ever built slantindicular. When you get to Bill Cody’s grave up top, you can lean off Lookout Mountain and spit in the South Platte.”

  The hack-driver took up a stub of crayon suspended from a nail, and almost unconsciously he raised it toward the mountain states, and then almost consciously he let it fall.

  “That’s where my walking-days really began,” Varner said. “I pointed myself west and just marched, and if I hadn’t, I’d be there yet. Morning, noon, and night, I plodded along, and where I fell down for the third time, that’s where I slept. There was damn near nothing up there but sky. Houses forty miles apart, and in between a one-way nick in a side-hill. It wasn’t a road: it was a toe-hold. The summit of Berthoud Pass lies at eleven thousand feet, and I made it one night in a hailstorm that bounced like a cow you-knowing on a flat rock.”

  “Hail can kill you,” the hack-driver said.

  “I bleed at a mile,” Varner said, “and from Berthoud to Steamboat Springs, there’s hardly a yard that isn’t higher. When I say bleed, I mean you drip and dribble, and you’re always dabbing at your nose, and on the back of your hand, you’ve always got a fresh slash of red: you bleed all the time. And drink!—man, you’re like a drain in a sink up there. The only trouble is, there’s mighty little water you can reach without a drill.”

  “Steamboat Springs,” the hack-driver said. “Jesus, what a name!”

  The child was still playing train, still tirelessly moving a battered piece of tin over some division without end, and the woman, although at work now on a different stocking, still held the same focus of eyes and fingers, and the hack-driver still stood staring at the map, but the sheet of paper seemed to have become transparent, as if its two-way terrain of words and lines for places and things were a window giving on the Union.

  “That stretch of country was bad as you’d ever want,” Varner said, “but from Sunbeam, Colorado, to Vernal, Utah, I hit a hundred miles of something that died a million years before time. I never did find out how hot it was, but it was hot enough to make the world flutter like a flag—the brush, the sand, the sky, the far-away mountains, your own hands, and your heart. At the west end of Sunbeam, there was a big sign warning you not to try those hundred miles on foot, and not being a fool, I sat me down and slow-fried in the shade till a man came along in a Benz and promised to take me all the way to Vernal. He had his wife and kid up front with him, so I piled in back with the duffel, and we were off. Half a day out and a good fifty miles from anything wet enough to drink, his left front shoe almost blew clear of the rim. It took us hours to fix it, pretty near the whole afternoon. The tools got so hot we had to wrap them in rags, and we worked in five-minute shifts, because only a fireman could’ve lasted longer, but in the end, after using all the patches we had and then a boot to cover them, we got the tire pumped up, and it held. I was about to climb in again when the guy shook his head, saying he was sorry, but he had his family to think of, and he’d have to lighten the load. Thanks for the help, he said, and a lot of other guff, but what it came to was that I was staying, and he was going. I had a tire-tool in my hand, and I remember getting set for a swing, but to this day I can’t tell you why I didn’t lay a hole in the guy’s roof. Some people are easy; some are hard. All I did was fling the hunk of iron through his windshield, that and this: I said, ‘Mister, many’s the one I’ve called a son-of-a-bitch, but you’re the first pissin’ man that ever really came from the back end of a dog … !’ I’m sorry, Polly, I ought to watch my language with the kid around, but that dirty dingo could’ve shot me in the lung and done me less damage. Helping with that blowout had cooked me for walking, and when the Benz rolled away, I put myself to bed right in the road. I slept for sixteen hours, and by the time I woke up, the sun had gotten to me, and I was all through standing up. I managed to crawl over to a clump of sage, but I could’ve saved my sweat; nothing would’ve run over me, because nothing came along for two solid days, only some birds, big black bald-headed bastards that sailed around waiting for me to die—and I was beginning to die. I heard bees swarming in my head, and there was falling water a yard from my face, and a million voices were murmuring words I couldn’t understand—and then all the sounds came together in the sound of a motor. The people told me later that when they reached me, I was sitting there licking a hot rock like it was an ice-cream cone.”

  The child was on the woman’s lap now, entertaining his eyes among the spools of color in the sewing-basket. The woman was watching the hack-driver, who was watching something that only he seemed to see.

  “From Vernal,” Varner said, “the going was better for a way, and I kept to the road through Provo to Salt Lake and out beyond for about one more day. That brought me to something that looked like the burnt-out bottom of the pot, what an ocean might be if you boiled it away to salt and silt. Nothing on two feet could’ve crossed it on foot: anyone who tried would’ve wound up as a few buttons and a belt-buckle in the dust. I hit the rods again, riding Western Pacific iron over the whole of Nevada and down the Feather River Gorge to Oroville. From there, it was only a whoop and a holler to San Francisco Bay, and I made that standing on the lower jaw of a ferry, sniffing the spray for a whiff of Japan.”

  “Frisco,” the hack-driver said. “What’s it like, Web?”

  “Like itself,” Varner said. “It’s the only city I’ve ever been in that isn’t like some other city. It’s different, from the ground it’s built on to the air that gets a washing for eight thousand miles before you use it. Christ, it’s a town to live in and never die in. It gives you the feeling that you’re so all-alive when you’re living that you just couldn’t be all-dead if you died. Clothes feel good on you in Frisco, the only place in the world where they do, and your skin stays cool, and fruit is cold, like it was early morning all day long, and even the street-names are like cracked ice: Crocker, Sutter, Sutro, Sansome, Drumm, and Daggett. You’re always ready for a steak (God help a panhandler in Frisco!), and you always feel like walking, and smokes taste good, every one you light, and you sleep ’way down deep in sleep, and it’s all you can do to keep your hands off the women that pass you by, and sometimes you don’t. You feel like you’re charged. Your blood’s got seltzer in it, and you climb thirty-degree grades with your heart working the way it did before you grew short hair, and from the top of one of the hills, you look around and down at the bay, and you breathe as if breathing was all inhale—as if, like the bay, you’d never fill. You stand there with your back to the Pacific, and east of you, for three hundred years and three thousand miles, is America—and all at once you know it’s all yours!”

  The hack-driver said, “There’s an eatery in Frisco called Tait’s. Did you ever run onto it?”

  “Sure,” Varner said. “It’s one of the best. Where’d you hear about it?”

  “Oh, I must’ve read something some place.”

  “I ate there two-three times. A guy stood me.”

  �
��They say it’s like Rector’s.”

  “I was hanging around Graney’s one afternoon, watching some sports shoot pool,” Varner said. “It was a two-handed game, and it broke up when one of the players was called away. The other said he had some time to kill and wanted to know if I cared to take a cue. I didn’t have enough change on me to buy my way into a pay-toilet, but I said sure. He said how about a dollar a point to make it interesting, and I said sure. He broke, and I ran 49 balls on him before phrigging up an easy little bank-shot with a scratch. I beat him 100—14 in four innings. He must’ve thought I was De Oro in disguise, but he had sand, and he wanted to go on, so I beat him for drinks, for supper at Tait’s, for my room-rent at the hotel, for a fling at the garters (apologies to my sister Polly), and for a hundred bucks in cash—and with an eye to the future, I beat him for breakfast the next day and a jaunt to the track.”

  “The track?” the hack-driver said. “What track?”

  “Some aviator was in town to fly his airship at a place called Tanforan. He did, too.”

  “You saw that?” the hack-driver said. “Hell, I only read about it. The guy had his picture in the papers. Down below, it said, ‘Louis Paulhan flying upside-down at Tanforan.’”

  “It was something to see,” Varner said.

  The woman rose, saying ‘I’m going to put the boy to bed.”

  The hack-driver was unaware that she had spoken. He said, “‘Louis Paulhan flying upside-down at Tanforan…!’”

  “Want to kiss your nephew good night, Web?” the woman said.

  “Hand him over,” Varner said.

  “I guess those’re the prettiest words in the language,” the hack-driver said. “Paulhan at Tanforan!”

  “Instead of playing with your husband all evening,” Varner said, “I should’ve played with this kid,” and taking the boy in his arms, he kissed him a long slow kiss on the cheek. “He smells good, but that’s all I know about him except his name. Does he talk?”