“I do have confidence in you,” Sheppard said intensely. “I have every confidence in you. I believe in you and I trust you completely.”
“You got your eye on me all the time,” the voice said sullenly. “When you get through asking me a bunch of questions, you’re going across the hall and ask Norton a bunch of them.”
“I have no intention of asking Norton anything and never did,” Sheppard said gently. “And I don’t suspect you at all. You could hardly have got from the picture show down town and out here to break in a house and back to the picture show in the time you had.”
“That’s why you believe me!” the boy cried, “—because you think I couldn’t have done it.”
“No, no!” Sheppard said. “I believe you because I believe you’ve got the brains and the guts not to get in trouble again. I believe you know yourself well enough now to know that you don’t have to do such things. I believe that you can make anything of yourself that you set your mind to.”
Johnson sat up. A faint light shone on his forehead but the rest of his face was invisible. “And I could have broke in there if I’d wanted to in the time I had,” he said.
“But I know you didn’t,” Sheppard said. “There’s not the least trace of doubt in my mind.”
There was a silence. Johnson lay back down. Then the voice, low and hoarse, as if it were being forced out with difficulty, said, “You don’t want to steal and smash up things when you’ve got everything you want already.”
Sheppard caught his breath. The boy was thanking him! He was thanking him! There was gratitude in his voice. There was appreciation. He stood there, smiling foolishly in the dark, trying to hold the moment in suspension. Involuntarily he took a step toward the pillow and stretched out his hand and touched Johnson’s forehead. It was cold and dry like rusty iron.
“I understand. Good night, son,” he said and turned quickly and left the room. He closed the door behind him and stood there, overcome with emotion.
Across the hall Norton’s door was open. The child lay on the bed on his side, looking into the light from the hall.
After this, the road with Johnson would be smooth.
Norton sat up and beckoned to him.
He saw the child but after the first instant, he did not let his eyes focus directly on him. He could not go in and talk to Norton without breaking Johnson’s trust. He hesitated, but remained where he was a moment as if he saw nothing. Tomorrow was the day they were to go back for the shoe. It would be a climax to the good feeling between them. He turned quickly and went back into his own room.
The child sat for some time looking at the spot where his father had stood. Finally his gaze became aimless and he lay back down.
The next day Johnson was glum and silent as if he were ashamed that he had revealed himself. His eyes had a hooded look. He seemed to have retired within himself and there to be going through some crisis of determination. Sheppard could not get to the brace shop quickly enough. He left Norton at home because he did not want his attention divided. He wanted to be free to observe Johnson’s reaction minutely. The boy did not seem pleased or even interested in the prospect of the shoe, but when it became an actuality, certainly then he would be moved.
The brace shop was a small concrete warehouse lined and stacked with the equipment of affliction. Wheel chairs and walkers covered most of the floor. The walls were hung with every kind of crutch and brace. Artificial limbs were stacked on the shelves, legs and arms and hands, claws and hooks, straps and human harnesses and unidentifiable instruments for unnamed deformities. In a small clearing in the middle of the room there was a row of yellow plastic-cushioned chairs and a shoe fitting stool. Johnson slouched down in one of the chairs and set his foot up on the stool and sat with his eyes on it moodily. What was roughly the toe had broken open again and he had patched it with a piece of canvas; another place he had patched with what appeared to be the tongue of the original shoe. The two sides were laced with twine.
There was a excited flush on Sheppard’s face; his heart was beating unnaturally fast.
The clerk appeared from the back of the shop with the new shoe under his arm. “Got her right this time!” he said. He straddled the shoe-fitting stool and held the shoe up, smiling as if he had produced it by magic.
It was a black slick shapeless object, shining hideously. It looked like a blunt weapon, highly polished.
Johnson gazed at it darkly.
“With this shoe,” the clerk said, “you won’t know you’re walking. You’ll think you’re riding!” He bent his bright pink bald head and began gingerly to unlace the twine. He removed the old shoe as if he were skinning an animal still half alive. His expression was strained. The unsheathed mass of foot in the dirty sock made Sheppard feel queasy. He turned his eyes away until the new shoe was on. The clerk laced it up rapidly. “Now stand up and walk around,” he said, “and see if that ain’t power glide.” He winked at Sheppard. “In that shoe,” he said, “he won’t know he don’t have a normal foot.”
Sheppard’s face was bright with pleasure.
Johnson stood up and walked a few yards away. He walked stiffly with almost no dip in his short side. He stood for a moment, rigid, with his back to them.
“Wonderful!” Sheppard said. “Wonderful.” It was as if he had given the boy a new spine.
Johnson turned around. His mouth was set in a thin icy line. He came back to the seat and removed the shoe. He put his foot in the old one and began lacing it up.
“You want to take it home and see if it suits you first?” the clerk murmured.
“No,” Johnson said. “I ain’t going to wear it at all.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sheppard said, his voice rising.
“I don’t need no new shoe,” Johnson said. “And when I do, I got ways of getting my own.” His face was stony but there was a glint of triumph in his eyes.
“Boy,” the clerk said, “is your trouble in your foot or in your head?”
“Go soak your skull,” Johnson said. “Your brains are on fire.”
The clerk rose glumly but with dignity and asked Sheppard what he wanted done with the shoe, which he dangled dispiritedly by the lace.
Sheppard’s face was a dark angry red. He was staring straight in front of him at a leather corset with an artificial arm attached.
The clerk asked him again.
“Wrap it up,” Sheppard muttered. He turned his eyes to Johnson. “He’s not mature enough for it yet,” he said. “I had thought he was less of a child.”
The boy leered. “You been wrong before,” he said.
* * *
That night they sat in the living room and read as usual. Sheppard kept himself glumly entrenched behind the Sunday New York Times. He wanted to recover his good humor, but every time he thought of the rejected shoe, he felt a new charge of irritation. He did not trust himself even to look at Johnson. He realized that the boy had refused the shoe because he was insecure. Johnson had been frightened by his own gratitude. He didn’t know what to make of the new self he was becoming conscious of. He understood that something he had been was threatened and he was facing himself and his possibilities for the first time. He was questioning his identity. Grudgingly, Sheppard felt a slight return of sympathy for the boy. In a few minutes, he lowered his paper and looked at him.
Johnson was sitting on the sofa, gazing over the top of the encyclopedia. His expression was trancelike. He might have been listening to something far away. Sheppard watched him intently but the boy continued to listen, and did not turn his head. The poor kid is lost, Sheppard thought. Here he had sat all evening, sullenly reading the paper, and had not said a word to break the tension. “Rufus,” he said.
Johnson continued to sit, stock-still, listening.
“Rufus,” Sheppard said in a slow hypnotic voice, “you can be anything in the world you want to be. You can be a scientist or an architect or an engineer or whatever you set your mind to, and whatever you set your
mind to be, you can be the best of its kind.” He imagined his voice penetrating to the boy in the black caverns of his psyche. Johnson leaned forward but his eyes did not turn. On the street a car door closed. There was a silence. Then a sudden blast from the door bell.
Sheppard jumped up and went to the door and opened it. The same policeman who had come before stood there. The patrolcar waited at the curb.
“Lemme see that boy,” he said.
Sheppard scowled and stood aside. “He’s been here all evening,” he said. “I can vouch for it.”
The policeman walked into the living room. Johnson appeared engrossed in his book. After a second he looked up with an annoyed expression, like a great man interrupted at his work.
“What was that you were looking at in that kitchen window over on Winter Avenue about a half hour ago, bud?” the policeman asked.
“Stop persecuting this boy!” Sheppard said. “I’ll vouch for the fact he was here. I was here with him.”
“You heard him,” Johnson said. “I been here all the time.”
“It ain’t everybody makes tracks like you,” the policeman said and eyed the clubfoot.
“They couldn’t be his tracks,” Sheppard growled, infuriated. “He’s been here all the time. You’re wasting your own time and you’re wasting ours.” He felt the ours seal his solidarity with the boy. “I’m sick of this,” he said. “You people are too damn lazy to go out and find whoever is doing these things. You come here automatically.”
The policeman ignored this and continued looking through Johnson. His eyes were small and alert in his fleshy face. Finally he turned toward the door. “We’ll get him sooner or later,” he said, “with his head in a window and his tail out.”
Sheppard followed him to the door and slammed it behind him. His spirits were soaring. This was exactly what he had needed. He returned with an expectant face.
Johnson had put the book down and was sitting there, looking at him slyly. “Thanks,” he said.
Sheppard stopped. The boy’s expression was predatory. He was openly leering.
“You ain’t such a bad liar yourself,” he said.
“Liar?” Sheppard murmured. Could the boy have left and come back? He felt himself sicken. Then a rush of anger sent him forward. “Did you leave?” he said furiously. “I didn’t see you leave.”
The boy only smiled.
“You went up in the attic to see Norton,” Sheppard said.
“Naw,” Johnson said, “that kid is crazy. He don’t want to do nothing but look through that stinking telescope.”
“I don’t want to hear about Norton,” Sheppard said harshly. “Where were you?”
“I was sitting on that pink can by my ownself,” Johnson said. “There wasn’t no witnesses.”
Sheppard took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He managed to smile.
Johnson rolled his eyes. “You don’t believe in me,” he said. His voice was cracked the way it had been in the dark room two nights before. “You make out like you got all this confidence in me but you ain’t got any. When things get hot, you’ll fade like the rest of them.” The crack became exaggerated, comic. The mockery in it was blatant. “You don’t believe in me. You ain’t got no confidence,” he wailed. “And you ain’t any smarter than that cop. All that about tracks—that was a trap. There wasn’t any tracks. That whole place is concreted in the back and my feet were dry.”
Sheppard slowly put the handkerchief back in his pocket. He dropped down on the sofa and gazed at the rug beneath his feet. The boy’s clubfoot was set within the circle of his vision. The pieced-together shoe appeared to grin at him with Johnson’s own face. He caught hold of the edge of the sofa cushion and his knuckles turned white. A chill of hatred shook him. He hated the shoe, hated the foot, hated the boy. His face paled. Hatred choked him. He was aghast at himself.
He caught the boy’s shoulder and gripped it fiercely as if to keep himself from falling. “Listen,” he said, “you looked in that window to embarrass me. That was all you wanted—to shake my resolve to help you, but my resolve isn’t shaken. I’m stronger than you are. I’m stronger than you are and I’m going to save you. The good will triumph.”
“Not when it ain’t true,” the boy said. “Not when it ain’t right.”
“My resolve isn’t shaken,” Sheppard repeated. “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson’s look became sly again. “You ain’t going to save me,” he said. “You’re going to tell me to leave this house. I did those other two jobs too—the first one as well as the one I done when I was supposed to be in the picture show.”
“I’m not going to tell you to leave,” Sheppard said. His voice was toneless, mechanical. “I’m going to save you.”
Johnson thrust his head forward. “Save yourself,” he hissed. “Nobody can save me but Jesus.”
Sheppard laughed curtly. “You don’t deceive me,” he said. “I flushed that out of your head in the reformatory. I saved you from that, at least.”
The muscles in Johnson’s face stiffened. A look of such repulsion hardened on his face that Sheppard drew back. The boy’s eyes were like distorting mirrors in which he saw himself made hideous and grotesque. “I’ll show you,” Johnson whispered. He rose abruptly and started headlong for the door as if he could not get out of Sheppard’s sight quick enough, but it was the door to the back hall he went through, not the front door. Sheppard turned on the sofa and looked behind him where the boy had disappeared. He heard the door to his room slam. He was not leaving. The intensity had gone out of Sheppard’s eyes. They looked flat and lifeless as if the shock of the boy’s revelation were only now reaching the center of his consciousness. “If he would only leave,” he murmured. “If he would only leave now of his own accord.”
* * *
The next morning Johnson appeared at the breakfast table in the grandfather’s suit he had come in. Sheppard pretended not to notice but one look told him what he already knew, that he was trapped, that there could be nothing now but a battle of nerves and that Johnson would win it. He wished he had never laid eyes on the boy. The failure of his compassion numbed him. He got out of the house as soon as he could and all day he dreaded to go home in the evening. He had a faint hope that the boy might be gone when he returned. The grandfather’s suit might have meant he was leaving. The hope grew in the afternoon. When he came home and opened the front door, his heart was pounding.
He stopped in the hall and looked silently into the living room. His expectant expression faded. His face seemed suddenly as old as his white hair. The two boys were sitting close together on the sofa, reading the same book. Norton’s cheek rested against the sleeve of Johnson’s black suit. Johnson’s finger moved under the lines they were reading. The elder brother and the younger. Sheppard looked woodenly at this scene for almost a minute. Then he walked into the room and took off his coat and dropped it on a chair. Neither boy noticed him. He went on to the kitchen.
Leola left the supper on the stove every afternoon before she left and he put it on the table. His head ached and his nerves were taut. He sat down on the kitchen stool and remained there, sunk in his depression. He wondered if he could infuriate Johnson enough to make him leave of his own accord. Last night what had enraged him was the Jesus business. It might enrage Johnson, but it depressed him. Why not simply tell the boy to go? Admit defeat. The thought of facing Johnson again sickened him. The boy looked at him as if he were the guilty one, as if he were a moral leper. He knew without conceit that he was a good man, that he had nothing to reproach himself with. His feelings about Johnson now were involuntary. He would like to feel compassion for him. He would like to be able to help him. He longed for the time when there would be no one but himself and Norton in the house, when the child’s simple selfishness would be all he had to contend with, and his own loneliness.
He got up and took three serving dishes off the shelf and took them to the stove. Absently he began pouring the butterbeans and
the hash into the dishes. When the food was on the table, he called them in.
They brought the book with them. Norton pushed his place setting around to the same side of the table as Johnson’s and moved his chair next to Johnson’s chair. They sat down and put the book between them. It was a black book with red edges.
“What’s that you’re reading?” Sheppard asked, sitting down.
“The Holy Bible,” Johnson said.
God give me strength, Sheppard said under his breath.
“We lifted it from a ten cent store,” Johnson said.
“We?” Sheppard muttered. He turned and glared at Norton. The child’s face was bright and there was an excited sheen to his eyes. The change that had come over the boy struck him for the first time. He looked alert. He had on a blue plaid shirt and his eyes were a brighter blue than he had ever seen them before. There was a strange new life in him, the sign of new and more rugged vices. “So now you steal?” he said, glowering. “You haven’t learned to be generous but you have learned to steal.”
“No he ain’t,” Johnson said. “I was the one lifted it. He only watched. He can’t sully himself. It don’t make any difference about me. I’m going to hell anyway.”
Sheppard held his tongue.
“Unless,” Johnson said, “I repent.”
“Repent, Rufus,” Norton said in a pleading voice. “Repent, hear? You don’t want to go to hell.”
“Stop talking this nonsense,” Sheppard said, looking sharply at the child.
“If I do repent, I’ll be a preacher,” Johnson said. “If you’re going to do it, it’s no sense in doing it half way.”
“What are you going to be, Norton,” Sheppard asked in a brittle voice, “a preacher too?”
There was a glitter of wild pleasure in the child’s eyes. “A space man!” he shouted.
“Wonderful,” Sheppard said bitterly.
“Those space ships ain’t going to do you any good unless you believe in Jesus,” Johnson said. He wet his finger and began to leaf through the pages of the Bible. “I’ll read you where it says so,” he said.