We stood there. James looked around for a wall to lean on or a chair without arms. But the walls were jumbled up with their boxes, and we were standing by the banks of extra-small chairs.
“Would you like to sit down?” I asked him, loud enough for Hugh Peters to overhear.
“Oh,” Peters said. “Well. Didn’t think of that. Those chairs—” He pointed at the adult chairs near the front. “No good?”
James shook his head. “The arms will get in the way.”
“Let me look out back.”
He called over a salesman, and together they went to the storeroom. The salesman came back wheeling an oak desk chair, took a look at James, then wheeled it back.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea,” James said to me.
“They’ll find something.”
Then Hugh Peters and the salesman came out carrying a desk that matched the chair. Peters had taken off his suit jacket, had flipped his red necktie over one shoulder. The blotter slipped off the top and hit the floor.
“I hope, that this, is fine.” They set the desk down. Peters adjusted his tie, then wiped his shining forehead. “Should be tall enough, right?”
James sat on the edge. “Fine.”
“Well, let’s see. I think we’ll get a pretty big crowd. We’ve done radio, we’ve done the papers. Town’s talking about it. Kids mostly, and parents. So all we need you to do is sit and chat. Mention what you like about the shoes. How they treating you, our shoes?”
“They’re good,” said James.
“They don’t pinch, right? Give you good support?”
“Very good support.”
“Okay, mention that.”
“I will.” James nodded.
“Good support for growing feet — and who’d know better than you, right?”
“Let’s take a gander at your dogs, Jim.” The salesman knelt down. “Let’s see,” he said, looking at the brace that buckled beneath the sole of the shoe, “how does this work?” Then he figured it out, undid it. The brace swung back with a creak. He unlaced James’s high stiff shoe and slipped it off.
Even I could smell it: terrible, acrid. James’s sock was soaked through at the toe. The salesman made a face.
“Wow,” he said. He held on to James’s heel a moment, at a dry spot. Then he said, “Maybe you want to wash your feet, Jim. There’s a sink out back, in the men’s room.”
James looked down at his foot. “Okay. Put the shoe back on?” The man did. “Tie it, too, will you?” The man clearly wanted to get away from that foot as quickly as he could, but he obeyed.
James stood; the unfastened brace clattered against itself. I followed him to the men’s room, which would have been cramped for a regular-sized person.
“Do you want some help?”
“Be quicker that way.” He wedged himself in and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, leaned against the wall.
I knelt down; I had to open the door to give the back half of me room. “Hand ’er over,” I said, and he scooted the foot in my direction. I unlaced the shoe — the salesman had fixed a knot instead of a bow — and slipped it off.
I’d been mad at the salesman at first for what seemed like rudeness, but this close I understood that it must have taken all he had to be that polite. It was what you might expect something dead to smell like, complicated and searing. I tried not to cough.
Then I slipped off his sock and saw that what I had thought was just sweat, just the usual bad manners of boyhood biology, was blood and fluid. His foot was meaty, rubbed wrong by the shoe and by itself. Some places the skin was white, other places pink. Up by his heel his skin was so dry it looked like it would flake off at a touch. The whole thing was cold. His toes were worst: the nails curled around their own toes, or knifed their neighbors, tore them up.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard somebody say. It was the salesman, looking over my shoulder. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“We’ll be with you in a minute,” I said. “We’re taking care of it.” I got up and turned on the sink, soaked some paper towels through. I pumped some soap from the dispenser into my palm and then let the water flow over it into the sink.
I said, “Are your feet always like this?”
“Sometimes,” said James. His voice was low, and when I looked up he was close to tears. “I can’t feel them,” he said. “How can I know if I don’t feel them?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll clean them up.” I picked up the wad of paper towels and knelt again.
“I can’t help it. I can’t help it if I don’t know.”
“James,” I said. I held on to his foot. “Just calm down and everything will be fine.” I doubted this. The foot looked infected, and suddenly I realized there was a good chance the other would be just as bad, if not worse. I stuck my head out of the bathroom. “Hey,” I said to the salesman, who was talking to Hugh Peters. “Do you have a bowl, and perhaps a towel, a cloth one?”
“Let me look,” he said.
The paper towels fell to messy pieces as I swabbed at James’s foot. “That’s better,” I said, because it was, anything was better. “What you chiefly need is a pedicure. In the meantime, maybe we should go home.”
“No,” he said. “I told them I’d be here.”
I thought, But I bet they don’t want you here now. Of course they didn’t, and that made me want to stay. I wanted to fix the whole thing, but the whole thing was so bad. How could this have happened? We kept him fed, got him books, we sent him on a walk with a pretty girl, we worried and we fussed and we never thought about his feet. Never occurred to us that someone who could not feel his feet would have problems with them: weren’t all foot problems pain?
“Let’s give it a chance,” he said. “They advertised and everything. They’ve already paid me some, and they’re going to pay more.”
“Here you go,” said the salesman. He handed me a grimy towel and a roasting pan. “Borrowed them from the restaurant next door.”
I said to James, “Let’s get you clean.” I filled the pan and lifted it, wobbling, to the floor. “Pick up your foot and set it here.” I rolled up his pant leg so that it wouldn’t slop in the water. It was a man’s calf now, thin but with hair scattered over the skin.
“I have to do this,” he said. “I can’t have come all this way just to leave.”
“Oh, honey,” I said. I put my hand in the water. I laced my fingers between his toes, those sticky toes, sharp with their uncut nails. “I don’t even know if I can get your shoe back on.”
“Give it a chance, huh? We won’t get my feet measured, but I can still meet the kids.”
We kept still a minute, me holding on to his foot, him wedged back on that toilet, one arm draped over the sink. Shouldn’t he get to a doctor, get those feet checked out? The water in the roasting pan was getting cold. I wanted to dry his foot, but the restaurant towel was filthy.
Well, we’d have to improvise something. We were used to it. Ordinary-sized people, they don’t know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600 B.C. somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892. Somebody like James had to ad-lib any little thing: how to sit, how to travel.
I looked at him. “How long?”
“Half an hour,” he said. “Hour tops. And in the future,” he said, “we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“Know to be careful,” he said, but all I could think of was all the other things that could go wrong.
So I cleaned the other foot, which was bad, but not quite as. Blotted them dry with paper towels, chased down drops of moisture between his toes, in the cracks of neglected skin at his heels. The shoe store carried foot powder, and they donated a can to the cause. I got the shoes back on, without the socks, and told him to sit on the desk and stay put — avoid walking at all costs.