AT THE CEMETERY, as the casket was being lowered into the ground, Artie’s father tried to jump into his son’s grave. It took four men to pull him back, and when he tried to break free of them and do it again, the biggest of the four, who turned out to be his younger brother, put him in a headlock and wrestled him to the ground.
AT THE HOUSE after the burial, Artie’s mother, a tall woman with thick legs and broad hips, threw her arms around Ferguson and told him he would always be part of the family.
FOR THE NEXT two hours, he sat on the sofa in the living room talking to Artie’s little sister, whose name was Celia. He wanted to tell her that he was her brother now, that he would go on being her brother for as long as he lived, but he couldn’t find the courage to push the words out of his mouth.
SUMMER CAME TO a close, another school year began, and in mid-September Ferguson started writing a short story, which slowly grew into a rather long story by the time he finished it in the days before Thanksgiving. He suspected it had been inspired by the joke that was not a joke about the two A.F.s, but he wasn’t quite sure, since the story had come to him out of nowhere as a fully formed idea, and yet somehow or other Federman must have been in there, too, given that Federman was always with him now, would always be with him from now on. Not Archie and Artie, as he had been tempted to use at first, but Hank and Frank, those were the names of the principal characters, a rhyming pair rather than an assonant pair, but a lifelong pair for all that, in this case a pair of shoes, which was how the story got its title: Sole Mates.
Hank and Frank, the left shoe and the right shoe, meet for the first time in the factory where they were made, arbitrarily thrown together when the last person on the assembly line puts them into the same shoe box. They are a sturdy, well-crafted pair of brown leather lace-ups commonly known as brogans, and while their personalities are slightly different (Hank tends to be anxious and introspective while Frank is blunt and fearless), they are not different in the way that Laurel and Hardy are different, for example, or Heckle and Jeckle, or Abbott and Costello, but different, perhaps, in the way that Ferguson and Federman had been different — two peas from the same pod, yet by no means identical.
Neither one of them is happy in the box. They are still strangers at this point, and not only is it dark and stuffy in there, they have been jammed up against each other in a most intimate and compromising way, which leads to some unfriendly bickering at first, but then Frank tells Hank to get a grip on himself and settle down, they’re stuck with each other whether they like it or not, and Hank, understanding that he has no choice but to make the best of a bad situation, apologizes for having gotten them off on the wrong foot, to which Frank says, Is that supposed to be funny?, meaning he didn’t find the remark funny at all, and so Hank comes back at him by dropping his voice and speaking in a broad southern accent: Ah shoe hope so, brothuh brogan. Can’t live this life without no funnies, can we?
The box containing Hank and Frank is put on a truck and driven to New York City, where it ends up in the back room of the Florsheim shoe store on Madison Avenue, one more box added to the hundreds of boxes stacked on shelves waiting to be sold. That is their destiny — to be sold, to be de-boxed by a man with size eleven feet and led away from the back room of that store forever — and Hank and Frank are impatient to begin their lives, to be out in the open air walking with their master. Frank is confident about their chances for a quick sale. They’re an everyday sort of pair, he tells Hank, not some novelty item like patent leather dress shoes or Santa Claus slippers or fleece-lined snow boots, and since everyday shoes are the ones most in demand, it shouldn’t be long before they can say good-bye to this dreary, stinking box of theirs. Maybe so, Hank says, but if Frank wants to talk about odds and statistics, he should think about the number eleven. Size eleven worries him. It’s much bigger than average, and who knows how long they’ll have to wait before Mr. Bigfoot walks in and asks to try them on? He’d be much happier with an eight or a nine, he says. That’s what most men wear, and most means faster. The bigger the shoe, the longer it’s going to take, and size eleven is one hell of a big shoe.
Just be glad we’re not a twelve or thirteen, Frank says.
I am, Hank replies. I’m also glad we’re not a six. But I’m not glad we’re an eleven.
After three days and three nights on the shelf, a bleak span that only prolongs their doubts and febrile calculations about when and how they will be rescued, if indeed they will be rescued at all, a clerk finally comes in the next morning, pulls out their box from the tower of boxes they were consigned to, and carries them into the showroom at the front of the store. A customer is interested! The clerk removes the lid from the box, and in that first moment when the light of the world shines upon them, Hank and Frank start to tingle with joy, a joy so vast and intoxicating that it spreads all the way to the tips of their laces. They can see again, see for the first time since the factory worker put them in their box, and now that the clerk is taking them out of the box and putting them on the floor in front of the seated customer, Frank says to Hank, I think we’re in business, pal, to which Hank responds, I certainly hope so.
(Note: At no point in the story does Ferguson address the question of how shoes can talk, in spite of the fact that all lace-up shoes are equipped with tongues. If it is a problem, he solves the problem by refusing to consider it. Nevertheless, the language spoken by Hank and Frank is apparently inaudible to human beings, since the two of them carry on conversations wherever and whenever they like, with no fear of being overheard — at least not by living people. In the presence of other shoes, however, they must be more circumspect, for all shoes in the story speak Shoe. As it happened, none of Ferguson’s early readers objected to his use of that absurd, make-believe language. They all seemed to go along with it as a legitimate case of poetic license, but several people thought he had gone too far by giving Hank and Frank the ability to see. Shoes are blind, one person said, everybody knows that. How on earth can shoes possibly see? The fourteen-year-old author paused for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and said: With their eyelets of course. How else?)