Too late for shoes!

The Investigator’s Shoes

Unfortunately due to the signature of Tom’s confidentiality agreement the whereabouts of the shoes and the events described are only contained by the same shoes’ perspective. He wore the same shoes begrudgingly buying a new pair annually at the bargain department of Nordstrom’s Rack. He bought the shoes with the blackest, thickest soles on green leather tongues. The laces squirmed loosely like centipedes. He walked everywhere. He never drove, if he could walk safely in the allotted slot assigned for his schedule, which allowed a wide margin of error. He went to interview a small, 2 1/2, nuclear family in the state of Maine as a writer from a Portland magazine. The first days he came to the house, the pavement was covered in ice and he slid more than stepped. A sidewalk was a skiers slope with his ordinary shoes like ski boots took a step by step parallel to the level. His socks soaked to the heels. Small children mocked with restrained laughter because he was stupid to go out in snowy weather with those shoes.

His boots were perfectly dry, and sitting at home because he always seemed to wear the same shoes. His interview went successfully in the short term. The courtesy to take off ones shoes entering the apartment door, and before going in the passage at the apartment house. His shoes waited on the muddy carpet, which was soaked in mud, a square cut from the pink carpet it can only be assumed was on the room floors. He was only in there for a little less than an hour and a half. The hard cement was slippery with water, damp and warm with the heat on high, but the walk was a little less than five miles and the heels had worn to stubs.

After the ice had melted and the ground became easier to traverse, the same shoes were on their way to his third meeting with the same father of 2 1/2, whose details are confidential because of an agreement with the magazine publishers and the shoes limited surveillance to the cut of rug on the vestibule. He walked on the rubber snapped with cold, and made warmer, and more worn by the rough pavement covered with hard bits from the thaw of snow and ice, which had melted like a glacier littering the earth with pieces of debris. His feet swamped in the mud as he crossed over a traffic island in the moist grass. To the shoes Tom seemed to purposefully go across mud and water, snow and things that made his feet damper, puddles in the gutter, in the street, on the sidewalk, all mutually dampening.

The walk home was disheartening. He seemed to slip his shoes on after the audio taped discussion much slower than previously. He wore the strap for the recorder box on his shoulder, and a mile on the road to home, he stopped to play the recording. He had his headphones on, but rewound the tape to replay a short excerpt over, and over. It began to rain sometime when he was still inside talking with the interviewee. He was only gone for less than fifteen minutes. His soles were all the way worn down from the walk there and back as well as from previous assignments. The floorboards ached as water slid off the varnish to the moist dirt in the cracks between the nails. He was in the magazines publishing house. The keyboard clicked, clacked, and the tape rewound, fast forwarded and clicked. The reel began to move, slowed to a squeak and the play button went click. The stop button went snap.

After he went up the steep stairs to the third story of his rented apartment, turned the key and took to the couch with his socks on the table. His shoes hung out on the carpet down the hall wet with shoes, garbage bags and dirty laundry in sack cloths. An argument with his roommates started from the other end of the apartment. The footsteps went down the steep stairs. The disagreement repeated, limited to beans. ‘We cannot continue with… this.’ ‘Beans,’ that was said simultaneously by girls irritated by ‘moths.’

He left some chocolate on the counter which he put in the refrigerator. ‘If,’ Tom suggested he cover the beans soaked in water in plastic. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no, no,’ like she were talking to herself, took a sip of a jug of burgundy wine and pushed her butt so far into her chair seat that her vestibule poked out. ‘This isn’t working,’ she scoffed. ‘Please,’ he said asking the girls to keep their voices down and to be considerate to keep the blood to alcohol rate lower while arguing. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said to the glasses of burgundy. He actually did. The apartment smelled like liquor, cigarettes and cheap wine.

He felt like the leather on his soles. He walked to the groceries for food, to several different stores and to the library for books, the coffee shops to drink coffee at odd hours and read. He was numerous hours at movie theaters and bus stops with a book in his pocket. His feet became sore with the places he went to because of the distance he had to walk to get there, and back. On the third of the month she did not pay. He did not either. He forgot to, but sent a check on the fourth. By the eighth he was on the mobile phone with the landlord, who lived out of state in Baltimore. In the aisles of the library basement between books on the African Congo he had a discussion what was to be done. On arriving home his roommate told him she told the pastor what he did, the very same man whom he’s not at liberty to say anything. To cut to the chase, the shoes were on the first floor of the apartment for the remaining days of the month while the girls’ shoes roughed it out on the third. The shoes were not so different, except Tom’s had worn soles, and the leather at the toes was dissolving at the seams because of his fat feet. He wore a 47.

On the plane ride home Tom wondered what she had said. In the interim the shoes had ridden on the car floor carpet of a red pickup truck, a Swede tan Volvo and the aluminum rubber public transit. The same shoes were on a mail boat in the hold and on the deck in the rain as the mailmen delivered letters to islands on the Casco Bay coast. The same shoes had walked on a strand of rocks by the blue ocean with bended feet, had stepped heel to toe on the sands of a beach to a lighthouse. They were in a shallow bin at the US airport and passed through an ex-ray machine. Did she say the chocolate was an unwelcome flirtation, or the shoes had tried to rape her?

If someone he knew out of the crowds in Baltimore went up to him to ask how Tom was, he’d say he was fine. They’d then ask, ‘what kind of shoes are they?’ ‘Ecco,’ he’d say. His mother sometimes asked him, ‘pick up your shoes,’ because Tom simply threw them whenever he wore them and grew tired. Wherever they’d land by the couch, by the refrigerator, in his bedroom. He put on his shoes to jog around the block by the lawn ornaments, the decorated porches and the undecorated houses. He preferred to walk at night when neither he, nor the shoes were in plain sight. The only light was streaming out of the headlights of approaching automotives. A shoe is never aware of it‘s own name, unlike cars which are vaguely aware. Orchestra parking was the most difficult. Tom had to carry a full-sized double bass more than three city blocks to get to the community orchestra concert hall to rehearse once, or twice a week. Always seemed like less than seven days except when he had to carry the fully grown instrument on his shoulder strap to and from the rehearsal space. His sores culminated around the bridge. He stood with his instrument, the contrabass, which is a stand-up cello instrument for the basso continuo of the lower registers, mostly for harmony and some melody, too. The lights were bright on stage, and he was irritated by his tight arches whose insoles had torn, and the heels had worn into. He held in his cry, but when the stage lights lit up beams on his rods and cones, he rolled his eyes and the conductor through a wave of her pointer finger threw a curveball meant for a baseball batter. He had to align his feet to take the swing, but his feet hurt. ‘Is now a good time to ask about parking permits?’ Joe asked. He wore sneakers, and also wore loafers. Charles, the principal knew they had to practice, but Tom was sure that the shoes were the problem-if he only had foot pads, or better shoes, or to be fare he had worn the same shoes for almost a year, or was it even more than that he was unsure of and the same shoes had gotten him where he needed to be. It took narrow walks and two flights of stairs to get the bass to a practice space in the attic-what made the space good is less secretive than the interviewee accounts. It was because of a mewing cat in the vestibule. He was fenced in from the upstairs of the house. The cat was a music hater. His shoes pressed to the wood toes first, and lifted at the calves to prevent chafing of the heel. He kicked off his shoes wherever. The heels were always the first to slip away. Sometimes he felt like his shoes, just tossed any random place, disregarded anywhere.