This mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, attracted Douglas. The towns never really won, they merely existed in calm danger, fully equipped with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man passed away and his equipment turned to flakes of rust.
The town. The wilderness. The houses. The ravine. Douglas looked around. But how to relate the two, make sense of the interchange when…
“Doug… come on… Doug…” The running boys vanished.
The first ritual of summer, the dandelion picking, the starting of the wine, was over. Now the second ritual waited for him to make the motions, but he stood very still.
“I’m alive,” thought Douglas. “But they’re more alive than me. How come?” He looked at his motionless feet and knew the answer…
That evening, on his way home from the show with his mother and father and his brother Tom, Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He looked quickly away, but his feet felt as if he was rushing, and the shop awnings flapped their canvas wings overhead because of the wind made by his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him.
“It was a nice movie,” said Mother.
Douglas murmured, “It was…”
It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of life and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks and the houses. Any moment the town would go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.
“Dad! Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes…”
His father didn’t even turn. “Can you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers?”
“Well…”
It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass.
“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Douglas tried to get all this in words.
“Yes,” said Father, “but what’s wrong with last year’s sneakers?”
Douglas felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, take off the leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but late June was still full of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs.
“Don’t you see?” said Douglas. “I just can’t use last year’s pair.”
For last year’s pair were dead inside. They had been fine last year when he had started to wear them. But by the end of summer, every year, you always knew, you couldn’t really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new summer, and he felt that with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all.
“Save your money,” said Dad. “In five or six weeks —”
“Summer’ll be over!”
That night Douglas lay watching his feet in the moonlight, free of the heavy winter shoes, the big lumps of winter fallen away from them.
“Reasons. I’ve got to think of reasons for the shoes.”
Well, first of all, the hills around town were full of friends. They were frightening away cows, playing barometer to the atmospheric changes, taking sun from dawn to sunset. To catch those friends, you must run much faster than foxes or squirrels. As for the town, it was full of enemies who got irritable with heat and remembered every winter argument and insult. Find friends, dump enemies! That was the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot motto. Does the world run too fast? Want to catch up? Want to be agile, stay agile? Litefoot, then! Litefoot!”
He shook his coin bank and heard the faint small tinkling, the light 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. In his dreams he heard a rabbit running in the deep warm grass.
Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the owner of a pet shop must move through his shop touching each animal in passing. 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 care, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stopped in the 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 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. Then, looking only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He started to put nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter 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. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run all night in his dreams. “I got something better than credit to offer!” Then he asked Mr. Sanderson when he himself had worn a pair of Litefoot sneakers.
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, doesn’t he? Candy-store man tastes his own stuff, I think. So…”
“You can see,” said the old man, “I’m wearing shoes.”
“But not sneakers, sir! How are you going to sell sneakers if you cannot praise them and how are you going to praise them if you don’t know them?”
“Well…,” said Mr. Sanderson.
“Mr. Sanderson,” said Douglas, “you sell me something