The Giant's House (19 page)

“It's been a while since I've checked,” said James. He smoothed his new shirt.

“About?”

“Eight feet two, last time I was measured.”

“But still growing?”

“So far,” said James.

“So you must be the tallest in the world by now. I mean,
nobody's
eight feet tall. Am I right?
Basketball
players aren't eight feet tall.”

“I don't know,” said James. “I don't follow basketball.”

“Well, come on in,” said Hugh Peters.

The shoe store had two doors: regular-sized and child-sized, right next to each other. “Play your cards right,” Hugh Peters said, “and we'll put in another one for you.”

It looked just like the shoe stores of my youth: boxes stacked along the walls like a puzzle whose point was to extract what you wanted without disturbing the whole pile; slanted stools; gray metal slide measures. Up front there were chrome chairs with shiny red vinyl seats; halfway back, in the children's section, were identical chairs half the size. From the front the chairs looked like some botched trick of perspective. A wicker basket in the back held
prizes for children who'd been good, and probably for those who hadn't. No customers yet.

“What's that?” James asked, pointing at a piece of machinery in the back.

“Fluoroscope,” said Hugh Peters. “Like an X ray. Helps us look at the bones of growing feet, figure out what'll fit 'em best.”

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.

And in fact we stayed two hours. We agreed with the shoe salesman that there was no point in measuring him for shoes—“His feet are all swollen out of size right now anyhow,” he said, “you can just measure them for me when you get home”—so James sat on the desktop and waited for the customers. Children ran in, their mothers following with the rolled-up newspaper page:
Meet the world's tallest boy!

“I figured he must be,” said Hugh Peters. “Now I think he must be the tallest man, too.”

The children were amazed by him. “You must be very old,” one said. James handed out presents from the wicker basket. He talked to mothers. One was holding a fat baby. “Ninety-ninth percentile for height and weight,” she said, joggling him. You could tell it was something she usually said with pride, but this time her voice was tinged with apprehension.

Hugh Peters tapped me on the shoulder. “Cup of coffee?” he asked. I shook my head. “Come back and talk to me a second, anyhow.”

He took me to the storeroom and sat down on a wobbly salesman's chair. “Nice kid,” he said. “Here, let me write you the check for the rest of his fee.”

“Got a lot of customers,” I said.

“Yeah. Advertising pays off.”

“Sorry it took so long to lure him out here. Now that he sees it's easy—he's having a great time with those kids—next time won't be so hard.”

Hugh Peters nodded seriously.

“And I was wondering,” I said, and why was I so bold? Two pleasant hours in a shoe store, and I was ready to ask for, I was ready to
demand
the moon. “What about the exposition in New York?”

“Oh,” said Hugh Peters. “I don't think that's such a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“He seems pretty fragile, don't you think?”

“Not as fragile as he looks.”

“I just don't want him to overextend himself.”

“I appreciate your concern—”

“Miss Cort,” said Peters. Now he looked me in the eye; I hadn't realized he'd been avoiding that. “We're a
shoe
company. He doesn't walk well. He has foot problems.”

“Foot problems one day,” I said.

“It isn't good advertising. We can work something out, certainly, with making his shoes and whatnot, we'd still like to use his name. But the exposition, no, I think we'll have to turn that possibility down.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I'm a businessman,” he said, then he sighed. It wasn't a businesslike sigh. “He's a nice man, nice boy, but what can I do? He's got those braces. I didn't know about the braces. If he falls, where does that leave us? You understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You'll tell him? Because it'll be better out of your mouth. Tell him what you like, what you think will make it okay. Make me a villain, if that's easier. I am sorry.”

Out in the shop James had his foot under the fluoroscope. Through the shoe leather and skin, you could see the jumbled-up bones, gray and aquatic-looking. He wiggled his ghostly toes for the children.

Hugh Peters left me to drive home James, who'd thought the day was a success. I'd insisted that we stop by his doctor's on the way home, and was already filled with shame that I hadn't insisted on medical attention right away. “That wasn't so bad,” said James, and for him that was a statement of starry-eyed optimism. “I'm thinking, Peggy, maybe I'll go into sales.”

“I thought you wanted to be a lawyer.”

“Law school takes forever. Next time I come out, I figure I'll prepare more.”

“Well,” I said. “That might be a while.”

He didn't hear me. He was remembering the ring of the cash register as the mothers bought their children shoes, a sound that James could think he caused. He did cause it, I'm quite sure. The salesman would hand the customer the change, and the customer turned to James and thanked
him
, not the salesman, not the president of the company.

The doctor scrubbed his feet down and prescribed a salve. A mild infection, not too bad. But the doctor was angry.

“Who's in charge of these things?”

“Me,” James said quietly. “I just didn't feel it.”

“Well then, you need help,” said the doctor. “If you can't tell when something's gone this wrong, enlist somebody who can. No reason for this sort of thing to happen.”

He clipped James's toenails, too. “Come here,” he told me. “Watch. Somebody else should know how to do this.”