He held his coin bank up and heard the faint small tinkling, the airy weight of money there.
Whatever you want, he thought, you got to make your own way. During the night now, let’s find that path through the forest. . . .
Downtown, the store lights went out, one by one. A wind blew in the window. It was like a river going downstream and his feet wanting to go with it.
In his dreams he heard a rabbit running running running in the deep warm grass.
Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the proprietor of a pet shop must move through his shop where are kenneled animals from everywhere in the world, touching each one briefly along the way. Mr. Sanderson brushed his hands over the shoes in the window, and some of them were like cats to him and some were like dogs; he touched each pair with concern, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stood in the exact center of the carpet and looked around, nodding.
There was a sound of growing thunder.
One moment, the door to Sanderson’s Shoe Emporium was empty. The next, Douglas Spaulding stood clumsily there, staring down at his leather shoes as if these heavy things could not be pulled up out of the cement. The thunder had stopped when his shoes stopped.
Now, with painful slowness, daring to look only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He made careful stacks of nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter, like someone playing chess and worried if the next move carried him out into sun or deep into shadow.
“Don’t say a word!” said Mr. Sanderson.
Douglas froze.
“First, I know just what you want to buy,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Second, I see you every afternoon at my window; you think I don’t see? You’re wrong. Third, to give it its full name, you want the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: ‘LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!’ Fourth, you want credit.”
“No!” cried Douglas, breathing hard, as if he’d run all night in his dreams. “I got something better than credit to offer!” he gasped. “Before I tell, Mr. Sanderson, you got to do me one small favor. Can you remember when was the last time you yourself wore a pair of Litefoot sneakers, sir?”
Mr. Sanderson’s face darkened. “Oh, ten, twenty, say, thirty years ago. Why . . .?”
“Mr. Sanderson, don’t you think you owe it to your customers, sir, to at least try the tennis shoes you sell, for just one minute, so you know how they feel? People forget if they don’t keep testing things. United Cigar Store man smokes cigars, don’t he? Candy-store man samples his own stuff, I should think. So . . .”
“You may have noticed,” said the old man, “I’m wearing shoes.”
“But not sneakers, sir! How you going to sell sneakers unless you can rave about them and how you going to rave about them unless you know them?”
Mr. Sanderson backed off a little distance from the boy’s fever, one hand to his chin. “Well . . .”
“Mr. Sanderson,” said Douglas, “you sell me something and I’ll sell you something just as valuable.”
“Is it absolutely necessary to the sale that I put on a pair of the sneakers, boy?” said the old man.
“I sure wish you could, sir!”
The old man sighed. A minute later, seated panting quietly, he laced the tennis shoes to his long narrow feet. They looked detached and alien down there next to the dark cuffs of his business suit. Mr. Sanderson stood up.
“How do they feel?” asked the boy.
“How do they feel, he asks; they feel fine.” He started to sit down.
“Please!” Douglas held out his hand. “Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, sponge around, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? It’s this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, but—soon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens?”
“What?”
“Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, burn your trash, run to the post office, telegraph office, library! You’ll see twelve of me in and out, in and out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast they’d take me? All those springs inside? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they kind of grab hold and can’t let you alone and don’t like you just standing there? Feel how quick I’d be doing the things you’d rather not bother with? You stay in the nice cool store while I’m jumping all around town! But it’s not me really, it’s the shoes. They’re going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back! There they go!”
Mr. Sanderson stood amazed with the rush of words. When the words got going the flow carried him; he began to sink deep in the shoes, to flex his toes, limber his arches, test his ankles. He rocked softly, secretly, back and forth in a small breeze from the open door.
The tennis shoes silently hushed themselves deep in the carpet, sank as in a jungle grass, in loam and resilient clay. He gave one solemn bounce of his heels in the yeasty dough, in the yielding and welcoming earth. Emotions hurried over his face as if many colored lights had been switched on and off. His mouth hung slightly open. Slowly he gentled and rocked himself to a halt, and the boy’s voice faded and they stood there looking at each other in a tremendous and natural silence.
A few people drifted by on the sidewalk outside, in the hot sun.
Still the man and boy stood there, the boy glowing, the man with revelation in his face.
“Boy,” said the old man at last, “in five years, how would you like a job selling shoes in this emporium?”
“Gosh, thanks, Mr. Sanderson, but I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”
“Anything you want to be, son,” said the old man, “you’ll be. No one will ever stop you.”
The old man walked lightly across the store to the wall of ten thousand boxes, came back with some shoes for the boy, and wrote up a list on some paper while the boy was lacing the shoes on his feet and then standing there, waiting.
The old man held out his list. “A dozen things you got to do for me this afternoon. Finish them, we’re even Stephen, and you’re fired.”
“Thanks, Mr. Sanderson!” Douglas bounded away.
“Stop!” cried the old man.
Douglas pulled up and turned.
Mr. Sanderson leaned forward. “How do they feel?”
The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man, his eyes burning, his mouth moving, but no sound came out.
“Antelopes?” said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes. “Gazelles?”
The boy thought about it, hesitated, and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he vanished. He just spun about with a whisper and went off. The door stood empty. The sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat.
Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-blazed door, listening. From a long time ago, when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky, gone through brush, under trees, away, and only the soft echo their running left behind.
“Antelopes,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Gazelles.”
He bent to pick up the boy’s abandoned winter shoes, heavy with forgotten rains and long-melted snows. Moving out of the blazing sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly, he headed back toward civilization. . . .
And the Sailor, Home from the Sea
“Good morning, captain.”
“Good morning, Hanks.”
“Coffee’s ready, sir, sit down.”
“Thank you, Hanks.”
The old man sat by the galley table, his hands in his lap. He looked at them and they were like speckled trout idling beneath frosty waters, the exhalations of his faint breath on the air. He had seen such trout as these surfacing in the mountain streams when he was ten. He became fascinated with their trembling motion there below, for as he watched they seemed to grow paler.
“Captain,” said Hanks, “you all right?”
The captain jerked his head up and flashed his old burning glance.
“Of course! What do you mean, am I all right?”
The cook put down the coffee from which rose warm vapors of women so far gone in his past they were only dark musk and rubbed incense to his nose. Quite suddenly he sneezed, and Hanks was there with a cloth.
“Thank you, Hanks.” He blew his nose and then tremblingly drank the brew.
“Hanks?”
“Yes, sir, Captain?”
“The barometer is falling.”
Hanks turned to stare at the wall.
“No, sir, it’s fair and mild, that’s what it says, fair and mild!”
“The storm is rising and it will be a long time and a hard pull before another calm.”
“I won’t have that kind of talk!” said Hanks, circling him.
“I must say what I feel. The calm had to end one day. The storm had to come. I’ve been ready now a long
