The customer is a big man, a great hulking fellow of broad girth with a pair of swollen ankles and the moist, pallid skin of someone who might or might not be suffering from diabetes or heart trouble. Not an ideal master, perhaps, but as Hank and Frank have told each other countless times over the past three days, shoes can’t choose. They must submit to the will of the person who buys them, no matter who that person happens to be, for their job is to protect feet, any and all feet under any and all circumstances, and whether those feet belong to a madman or a saint, shoes must perform that job in perfect compliance with the wishes of their master. Still, it is an important moment for the newly manufactured brogans, so young and gleaming in the stiffness of their cowhide uppers and untrammeled soles, for this is the moment when they will at last begin their lives as fully functioning shoes, and as the clerk slips Hank onto the customer’s left foot and then slips Frank onto the right, they both groan with pleasure, astonished by how good it feels to have a foot inside them, and then, miraculously, the pleasure only increases as the laces are tightened and the two ends are knotted into a crisp, firm bow.
It seems to be a good fit, the clerk says to the customer. Would you like to have a look in the mirror?
And so it is that Hank and Frank are able to see themselves together for the first time — by looking into the mirror as the fat man looks into the mirror as well. What a handsome pair we are, Frank says, and for once Hank is in accord with him. The finest brogans ever made, he says. Or, as the bard might have put it: the very kings of Cobbledom.
While Hank and Frank are admiring themselves in the mirror, however, the fat man is beginning to shake his head. I’m not sure, he says to the clerk, they look a bit clunky to me.
A man of your bulk needs a hardy shoe, the clerk replies, delivering his words in a matter-of-fact tone so as not to offend the customer.
Of course, the fat man mutters, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? But that doesn’t mean I have to walk around in these clodhoppers.
They’re classics, sir, the clerk says drily.
Cop shoes. That’s what they look like to me, the fat man says. Shoes for a plainclothes cop.
After a considerable pause, the clerk clears his throat and says: May I suggest we look at something else? A pair of wingtips, perhaps?
Yeah, wingtips, the customer says, nodding in agreement. That’s the word I was looking for. Not brogans — wingtips.
Hank and Frank are put back in their box, and a few moments later they are lifted off the floor by a pair of invisible hands and carried back to the back room, where they once again join the ranks of the unsold. Hank is burning with indignation. The fat man’s comments have incensed him, and as he spits out the words clunky and clodhopper for the forty-third time in the past hour, Frank finally speaks up and implores him to stop. Don’t you realize how lucky we are? he says. Not only was that man a numskull, he was an obese numskull, and the last thing we want is to be saddled with too much heft. If old Mr. Chunkowitz didn’t weigh three hundred pounds, he must have been a good two-sixty or two-seventy, and just imagine the day-to-day wear and tear of walking around with a mountain like that on top of us. Little by little, we would have been crushed, used up before our time, junked before we’d even had a chance to live. There might not be a lot of featherweights who wear size eleven, but at least we can hope for someone who’s lean and fit, a man with a light and even step. No waddlers or plodders for us, Hank. We deserve the best because we’re classics.
Two more misses follow over the next three days, one of them a near miss (a man who falls in love with them but discovers he needs a size ten and a half) and the other one a dud from the word go (a scowling teenage giant who mocks his mother for making him try on such ugly gunboats), and the wait goes on, so dispiriting in its languorous monotony that Hank and Frank begin to wonder if they aren’t doomed to remain on the shelf forever — unwanted, out of style, forgotten. Then, three full days after the gunboat insult, when all hope has disappeared from their hearts, a customer walks into the store, a thirty-year-old man named Abner Quine, six feet tall and a trim one hundred and seventy pounds, a size eleven who not only is looking for a pair of brogans but will not settle for anything but a pair of brogans, and so Hank and Frank are taken off the shelf for the fourth time, which turns out to be the last time, the end of their fretful week in black shoe-box limbo, for when Abner Quine sticks his feet into them and walks around the store to test them out, he says to the clerk, Excellent, they’re just what I wanted, and the two sole mates have finally found their master.
Does it make any difference that Quine turns out to be a cop? Not really, not in the long run it doesn’t, but after Hank and Frank were rejected by the fat customer for looking like a pair of cop shoes, it is something of a sore point with them, and rather than laugh at the coincidence they feel hurt and bewildered, for if brogans are the quintessential cop shoe, then it would seem they were fated all along to be worn by a flatfoot, a figure of immense ridicule in popular lore, and to be the shoe of preference for the flatfeet of this world, that is, the very embodiment of flat-footedness, means there must be something ridiculous about them as well.
Let’s face it, Hank says. We weren’t built for tuxedos and wild nights out on the town.
Maybe not, Frank replies, but we’re solid and dependable.
Like two tanks.
Well, who wants to be a sports car, anyway?
Cop shoes, Frank. That’s what we are. The lowest of the low.
But look at our cop, Hank. What a fine figure of a man he is. And he wants us. Low or not, he wants us, and that’s good enough for me.
The tough, fast-walking Abner Quine has recently been promoted to the rank of detective. He has traded in his nightstick and patrolman’s gear for a couple of business suits, a woolen one for the winter, a lightweight drip-dry for the summer, and has splurged on an expensive pair of shoes at Florsheim’s (Hank and Frank!), which he intends to wear for his detective work every day the year round, regardless of the weather. Quine lives alone in a small, one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, not the best of neighborhoods in 1961, but the rent is low and his precinct house is just four blocks away, and even though the apartment is often less than clean (the detective has little appetite for housework), Hank and Frank are impressed by how well he takes care of them. Though young in age, their master is a man of the old school, and he treats his shoes with respect, methodically undoing the laces at night and leaving them on the floor beside his bed rather than kicking them off and/or shutting them up in the closet, since shoes like to be near their master at all times, even when they are not on duty, and kicking off shoes without untying the laces can cause severe structural damage over the long haul. Quine tends to be busy and distracted while at work on his cases (robberies, mostly), but let anything fall on either one of his shoes, whether a white splat of pigeon shit or a red blob of ketchup, and he is quick to remove the offending substance with one of the Kleenex tissues he carries in his right front pocket. Best of all, there are his frequent jaunts to Penn Station to consult with his prime snitch, an old black man named Moss, who happens to run the shoeshine stand in the main hall, and as Quine plunks himself down in the chair to get the latest dope from Moss, more often than not he will ask for a shine to cover up the true purpose of his visit, thus killing two birds with one stone, as it were, doing his job and caring for his brogans, and Hank and Frank are the happy beneficiaries of this ruse, for Moss is an expert, with the fastest, most agile hands in the business, and to be rubbed by his cloths and massaged by his brushes is an unsurpassed pleasure for everyday shoes like Hank and Frank, a swooning plunge into the depths of footwear sensuality, and once they have been buffed and boffed by Moss’s sure hands, they end up spanking clean and waterproofed as well, winners on all fronts.