Boots

At last! It's story time again. The best word I can think of for today's piece is "confrontation," and I'm curious to see your opinions are on this.

The author, Stephen Baily, works the copy desk of a newspaper by day, but is a published writer by night. His poems have appeared on contemporaryrhyme.com and barefootmuse.com. He is also a playwright, having had staged public readings of two of his plays in Manhattan, and a third play nationally broadcast on the Public Radio Satellite System by Shoestring Radio Theatre in San Francisco. Here is his story, "Boots."

Boots
By Stephen Baily

Aldovici, John, was about to take off his left boot—the right one was already lying on the concrete at his feet—when a briefcase was put down on the bench alongside him.

We called them engineer's boots. Black, thick-soled and cinched at the instep with a buckle, in those days they were available to fashion-minded apprentices in a dubious branch of engineering only at select military-surplus stores. The briefcase was of a caramel-colored leather as yet unscuffed. Another sort of engineer might have found it useful for his purposes. Between two rows of lockers in the basement of Amerigo Vespucci Junior High School, the bench ran the length of an aisle in which a couple of dozen boys were changing from classroom attire into gym shorts and sneakers.

“You doing,” muttered Hervish, Barry, to whom the briefcase belonged.

That's right, don't answer, you son of a bitch. In the charm school of the streets it's axiomatic that greetings are never returned if their intent is propitiatory. Because it's also axiomatic that a snub is resented only in inverse ratio to the size of the snubber, Hervish became suddenly very interested in the dial of his combination lock. The lock had accompanied him through his academic career for so long he could have negotiated its intricacies blindfolded—and yet, in the spotlight of Aldovici's stare, his fingers stiffened like shy performers, overshooting the last number and making it necessary for him in intensifying anxiety to run through the sequence again. Twice around to the right and on to twelve. A full turn back to the left and on to two. A final quarter-turn back to the right to thirty-six. Success! He'd gripped the handle of the locker and was pulling the door open when a foot, still in a boot, kicked the door shut again with such violence that every head in the aisle snapped around, as at the report of a gun.

“I don't understand,” Hervish said, amid the subsiding echoes.

This was true but misleading. What baffled him wasn't the situation, which was self-explanatory, but his response to it—a wild surge of fear that, denied any other outlet, like some small crazed animal burrowed into his groin and began scrabbling for issue there.

Aldovici, busy with his boot again, remained silent.

The work proved difficult, so that, like a victim of constipation at stool, he grunted, clutching his shin with one hand and the boot with the other. The heel of the boot was caked with mud picked up at the site of the expressway under construction nearby. A footbridge had yet to be thrown over the roadbed for the convenience of students obliged to cross it. In consequence, traces of mud were also observable on Hervish's brown oxfords.

“No,” Aldovici said, without looking up, when Hervish reached for the handle again.

Bootless at last, in his stocking feet Aldovici rose. Though he turned out, when upright, to be shorter than Hervish, he was very nearly twice as wide. Freeing the end of his garrison belt from the loop that restrained it, he jerked the belt to the left till its big buckle unclasped. The black leather of the belt was studded with rivets of the same copper color as the zipper he now proceeded to draw down. Pinning to the floor with his right big toe the hem of his left jeans' leg, he extricated his left foot from the jeans, then used its heel to pin to the floor the hem of his right jeans' leg while he extricated his right foot. The gym shorts under his jeans were distinctly grimy. So was the white T-shirt under the turtleneck he pulled off over his head, to the detriment of his duck-tail. He was tying the laces of a beat-up pair of ankle-high handball sneakers with vulcanized toes when a bell rang with a clangor that made everyone wince. Reluctantly, the other boys in the aisle began filing out of it. As they turned the corner, they all looked back over their shoulders and grinned. Having stowed his boots away and shut his locker, Aldovici sauntered out after them, carelessly stuffing his T-shirt into the waistband of his shorts.