The Girl With the Golden Shoes (10 page)

“You are one of those?”

“No sir. Not at all.”

“What kind o’ person you is?”

“Oh. It hard to say. I never have to answer any question like that in my life before.” Then after she’d thought about her day she said, “Unlucky.”

“Well, you luck might change tonight.”

“Gimme a ride and maybe I’ll believe.”

He made a noncommittal exclamation.

“Well, it was nice to meet you,” he said, in Spanish again. “All the best and good luck.”

He began to untie the horse.

“Which part you going?” she asked in mild panic.

“Town,” he said, as if from deep inside a thought. “Seville.”

“Then I could get a ride?” She held him by the arm. “I thought you was stopping because you was going to give me a ride.”

“He’s an old horse,” the man said with false compassion. “And his leg is still not very good. And I’m not sure if he likes you.” He paused as if to think. “No…I don’t think he can take the weight.”

Nervous, she began to stroke the horse along the neck to show that she was liked.

“See there. He ain’t mind me at all.”

“But the weight…the weight…the weight.”

“I don’t weigh plenty,” she said. “Come. Weigh me.”

He reached for her and held her close and ran his hand along the length of her, pretending that he couldn’t find a grip. She was firm and tight with even curves, and as he lifted her, he paused and dipped her twice so that her little breasts would brush against his nose.

But although she was smooth and had a subtle give, the girl was densely muscled, and the man began to struggle with her weight. While wobbling, he softly slapped her flank, which signaled her to wrap her legs around him, giving both of them the pleasure of a quick embrace.

“Okay,” he murmured when he’d set her down. “Okay. You can come.”

With this, he lifted her as one would lift a bride, and placed her on the horse.

Accustomed to a kind of easy gruffness all her life, and feeling tender in the dark, she assented when he used his hand to draw her back into the armchair comfort of his chest.

The horse wasn’t covered with a saddle, and she found it hard to keep her balance on the padding made of sugar sacks.

“You okay?” he asked her when the horse began to move. “You ’fraid?”

“I feel high,” she said, too scared to turn her head in case the movement made her fall.

“You want me to hold you?”

“I feeling okay for a while.”

“When he start to trot it going be kind o’ rough. And the way you was talking I think you want to reach town really quick.”

“When you talk about trot and all that, it have me a little nervous,” she confessed. “He could see where he going? How he know where he going in the dark? Next thing something frighten him and he throw we off.”

He slipped an arm around her waist and used one hand to hold the rope.

“This horse is a good horse,” he said. “As long as he don’t think you want to fight me or nothing, he will do the best for you.”

When he felt as if she’d settled on the brawny colt, he asked, “So what you going to town to do?”

She answered brightly, “Improve myself and find a work.”

“What kind o’ work you can do?”

“I could do any kind o’ work,” she said. “I ain’t ’fraid hard work, you know. As long as people ain’t try to bamboozle me and get me in any kind o’ tug-o’-war, I could do anything.”

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”

He startled her.

“What happen?”

“Take your time. Slow down. Everybody ain’t from the countryside. I know
Sancoche
, but when you give it that backward twang you throw me.”

“Not because you gimme a ride you could insult me, you know, sir. I begging you a ride and I grateful for it, but I could walk my walk and reach where I going. I ain’t take insult.”

But when all this had left her mouth, she thought, You need to learn to hold you tongue. Suppose the man get vex and put you off, what you going do? The road hard. The way long.
Bangarang
down in Black Well. Tell the man you sorry. As old-time people say, when you hand in a lion mouth, take you time and pull it out.

“Mister …” she began, before he interrupted with, “I’m sorry.”

He said it in a way designed to touch her heart…mannish in his voice but childish in his tone.

Before she could speak again, he added: “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“Well, it was an ungrateful thing to say,” she said. “And I’m not ungrateful. Believe me. I just tired.”

“I’m tired too,” he replied, and placed his chin beside her neck. “We’re two tired people. We’re both sorry that we’re tired. We have so much in common that we’d make such good friends. Let’s do that. That’s what I want to do. I just want to ride with you and be your friend, and talk to you and get to know you. I want to know the way you think.”

She smiled. The movement of the horse beneath her was a mounting pleasure; but more importantly, the man had made her feel that he’d perceived her as a person with a mind.

“What you want to know?”

She squeezed a shoulder to her ear.

“I want to know about…you,” he half-stuttered. “About how you feel in general…about life.”

In English, the language of all things important and bright, she said, “I think to be boring is one of the most awful things that could happen in life.” In truth, she meant “bored.”

“Are you an exciting person?” he asked in English more fluent than hers.

“I think so. But I just haven’t got the chance to do a lot of things I really want to do.”

“Like what?” he asked warmly.

“Like to go to Europe.”

Her mind began to drift. And while she saw herself arriving in a car at La Sala and working in a store, and eating only beef and chicken at her meals and feeding fish and lobsters to her dog, the rider gripped the stallion tightly with his knees and ground against her flanks.

Getting no resistance, he slid a hand along her leg, which felt damp and firm and outward-curved with strength beneath her long blue skirt. With his thumb, he traced it where it had a solid crease along the side, where down below, he knew, there lurked the heavy bone.

“How much is for a pair o’ shoes in town?” she asked, distracted, returning to
Sancoche
.

He quickly moved his hands. She’d begun to shift her weight as if she’d just awoken from a dream.

“Are you comfy?” he asked. “You seem unsettled.”

“I don’t know,” she told him. “Maybe is because I know that Black Well coming up.”

“Oh. I thought you’d leaned against my pistol.”

“Oh. You have a gun?”

“Not that we’ll need to use it. I could walk through Black Well any time.”

He leaned away from her and fussed around his waist and made a mental count, then uttered, “There.”

“That feels better,” she told him when he eased her back to lean on him again.

“Now what kind o’ shoes you would like?”

She paused to think. Accustomed to the horse by now, she turned her head to speak.

“The kind you wear to work in a office or a shop.”

“I ain’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but you have money to buy shoes?”

He tapped her with his boots against her heel.

“I might,” she answered in a way she thought of as
mysteriously.
In fact it was
vague, as if she had no clue at all.

“You ain’t really know town, do you?” he asked in a sympathetic voice.

“What you trying to say? Of course.”

He didn’t challenge her, but proceeded in a tone that said that any difference of opinion when it came to town had little consequence because his perspective was right.

“I ain’t mean to disappoint you, but them fuckers—excuse my language—ain’t like to give
negritas
certain jobs, you know…in banks and office and shops. But you know this already of course.”

“I ain’t care what they like to do,” she said. “I just want to know what shoes you have to have to work there.”

“Well, being that I used to own a store,” he said, in English now, “I know a thing or two. Everybody else in my family are police, as I told you. That is one of the ways how I was able to get this .38. Be that as it may, I am the only one who had the head for business. But that too is for another day. Back to your question about shoes. You can’t just wear any shoes when you work in a place of business, you know. You have to wear the finest shoes. And the finest shoes in the world are English shoes. You can’t go for the kind of job you’re talking about in Spanish shoes or American shoes.” He slapped his thigh for emphasis. “No way. Wear one of those and the boss will take one look at you and say you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“For true?”

“Absolutely. Now why would I lie to you?”

“No. I’m not saying you is a liar, sir. Is just a phrase.”

“I know it’s just a phrase, sweetheart. But so is ‘Why would I lie to you?’”

“Oh.”

“I know about English shoes, you know. I know so much I could write a book. I know the English very well. I met a lot of them when I lived in Europe.”

“Really!”

She was so excited that she tried to turn around to face him. She lost her balance and he held her waist, then found and squeezed her hand.

With his fingers playing on her palm, he said: “I used to live there for a very long time.”

He said this in the kind of breathy tone in which a singer introduces certain kinds of sentimental songs, and she reacted with the gush of folks who purchase tickets for those certain kinds of shows.

“Where?” she asked him. “Which part? Tell me.”

“Paris,” he said. “Then after I lived in Paris, I moved …”

“To where?”

“Oh, after Paris…let me see…I lived in so many different places. Oh…after Paris I moved to France.”

“And what about the war?” she asked. It struck her that she hadn’t read the news. “You see the war?”

“
See
the war?” he chortled.
“See
the war? My love, I
fought
the war?”

“Oh Jesus Christ.”

“That’s why you need to listen when I talk. That’s why when I tell you about shoes you should never doubt me. You need English shoes, my friend, and those shoes are expensive. How much money do you have on you right now? How much could you put down on a counter for a pair of top-class English shoes?”

“Five pounds,” she said with force.

The man exploded in deep-throated laughter.

“That can’t buy it?” she asked with doubt, revealing that she didn’t know that she was right.

More excited now, he laughed again.

“Okay, then…fourteen pounds. I could walk into one o’ them stores and fling down fourteen pounds on that counter and say, ‘Gimme you best pair o’ goddamn English shoes. I have fourteen pounds on me right now.’”

He stopped the horse and put both arms around the girl.

“Good shoes like that cost forty pounds,” he said. “With fourteen pounds you couldn’t even buy a single foot.”

Estrella Thompson raised her head to calm herself, then dropped her chin and cried.

“But it’s not the end of the world,” he added in a fatherly way. “Oh, hush.”

“It ain’t you feeling pain. So you can say what you want.”

“I know pain,” he improvised. “I know a kind of pain I hope you’ll never understand. Look …”

He allowed his voice to fade.

“What happen to you?” she asked him, working to control her breath.

“I don’t want to talk.”

“What happen?”

“I…just don’t want …”

“Tell me?”

Her voice was creamy like a soft eruption.

“I want to. But I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You have to try.”

“I know, but …”

She told him sternly: “Do you know how many times I want someone to hear me and it ain’t nobody there?” She held his arms and used her weight to rock them. “I thought you said you wanted me and you to be good friends?”

He sighed. He hummed. He moaned. Then said, “When they shoot me in the war, you don’t think it hurt? It hurt so bad. It hurt so bad. It hurt so goddamn bad. As I talk about it now, I feel the pain as if it was happening again.” She felt him shiver. “I thought I was going to die. Death is not a easy thing. When it stare you in the face, you ain’t want to see it close again. And that’s how it feel when you talk about it.”

“I know it hard to talk about, but…what happened?”

“Three Japanese ambush me in Berlin. But I got them though. They thought I was dead. But I saw them running in the dark. And as I lie down there, thinking that was it, I shoot them down like birds.”

“In the dark?”

“In the dark. Dark night just like this. Well, not so dark, but noisy. Fighting is a cantankerous thing.”

With this, he got off the horse and walked away.

“Where you going?” she cried. “I ain’t want this horse to run away with me…and…and how you doing down there?”

She couldn’t see him in the dark, and she imagined rightly that his arms were raised toward the gods.

“I am a damn disgrace!” he screamed toward the sky. “I am nothing but a big disgrace!”

“What you mean? No. That ain’t true.”

“Of course I am. I should be taking care o’ you to
rass
and instead o’ doing that I’m crying like a baby. Oh lord. This thing called war is hell.”

She stumbled off the horse and groped toward his voice.

“You can’t leave the horse alone,” he called out, as he took a path toward a spot he often used.

Estrella led the horse toward the rider’s heavy breathing till she felt his hand against hers in the dark.

She left him with the horse and went to stand some yards away, allowing him the privacy to cry. Her whole being felt exposed and tender, and her fourteen-year-old heart was full of sympathy and awe for this traveler, this soldier, this stranger who’d come to her rescue, this gentleman who’d lifted her and placed her on his brave and faithful horse and tried to get to know her as he took her to the place where she’d get a chance to fix her damn unlucky life.

“What is your name?” she heard him asking from behind.

“Estrella,” she said. “Estrella Thompson is my name. And what is yours?”

“Simón,” he said. “Simón…Simón…Bolívar.”

She said in English, “That’s a wonderful, beautiful name.”