Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

The Jerk

7:03 PM

Winston Sprague sat in his expensive condo with the top-of-the-line television, stereo system, appliances, and personal workout room, paid for by indulging in dubious ethical behavior, and stared at the wall. After Winston had taken the old lady’s deposition, he had returned to his office and had dismissed it as being no big deal. But as the day wore on and he reread the deposition over and over, something about what the old lady said still nagged at him. She had been so damn specific about that damn shoe. He knew she was probably as crazy as a loon, but he had decided just for the hell of it to go back over to the hospital and go up on the roof and take a look around. When he got there, he went up and opened the door to the roof and walked all over the entire area, checked every corner. Nothing but a dead pigeon, and just as he had expected, no shoe. He was halfway embarrassed that he had even checked. As he stood there looking out over Kansas City, he laughed out loud when he thought of the old woman thinking she had floated over the roof and back into the hospital. As he was leaving, he glanced over at the old annex building, where the laundry facilities were now located, and figured while he was at it, he might as well go over and check out that roof as well. But when he got to the top landing of the other building, the door leading up to the stairs to the roof was locked. He had to go back down and find one of the janitors to go up with him and unlock the door.

“Is this door always locked?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you been up here lately?”

“No, not lately. The last time I can remember was when we had a couple of leaks and a company came and hot-mopped around that ledge.”

“When was that?”

“Three or four years ago.”

“Other than that, nobody’s been up here that you know of?”

“No.”

After the janitor unlocked the door for him, Winston walked up the narrow flight of stairs and pushed against the last door leading to the roof. It was either stuck or locked, he did not know which, but he kept pushing and shoving it until he was finally able to open it far enough to step out onto the roof. This building faced the south, and the sun was blinding as it reflected off of the light gray gravel that covered the entire roof. The afternoon heat was rising from the floor as he walked around and looked behind every chimney, but the only thing he found was an old mop handle. He walked around to the other side and glanced over behind the chimney closest to the ledge of the building. Nothing. He walked around the other side and looked. Suddenly he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up and started to break out in an ice-cold sweat. Lying on its side, wedged between the ledge and the chimney, was one brown golf shoe with cleats. Jesus Christ!

He closed his eyes and opened them again to make sure he was not hallucinating. He looked again. No. It was there, all right, exactly as she had described it. Sprague’s clothes were now wringing wet and sticking to him. He forced himself to walk over closer to it. He stood there looking down at it. Finally, after a moment, he cautiously nudged the shoe with his foot as if it were a snake that might bite. It did not move. He kicked it again. It still did not move. He crouched down and tried to pick it up, but still it would not budge. Half of the shoe was stuck in the black tar surrounding the chimney. He had to work at it for about five minutes with sweat pouring off of him, pulling it back and forth until it finally came loose in his hand. But now that he had the shoe, he stood there and wondered what the hell he was going to do with it, and how was he going to get the thing downstairs without anyone seeing him? He propped it up by the side of the door and ran down to the next floor and found a brown paper bag with half a sandwich inside in a trash can. Winston emptied the bag and ran back up and put the shoe in it, and then carried it under his arm. He went down the emergency stairs all the way to the basement, crossed over to the main building, and ran into the bathroom. He scrubbed as much of the tar off his hands as he could and hid the sack behind a door, and wondered why he was feeling like a criminal. He then ran back upstairs to Franklin Pixton’s office, ducked into the office, closed the door behind him, and stood against it, out of breath and sweating.

A surprised Pixton looked up at him. “What are you doing here? Why is your face so red? Have you been running?”

Sprague said, “A shoe on the roof!”

“A shoe on what roof?”

“In the deposition…the old lady, Mrs. Shimfissle…swore…she saw a shoe on the hospital roof.”

“So?”

“You d-don’t understand,” he sputtered. “She said she was floating around in the air up over the hospital and saw a shoe on the roof…and when I went up there, there was a shoe on the roof!”

“Are you making this up just to irritate me?”

“No. I’m telling you the truth, the shoe was exactly where she said it was.”

“Oh, come on, Winston, pull yourself together. It’s probably just a coincidence.”

“A coincidence? That it was in the exact spot she said it was, that it was a brown leather shoe? Not only a brown leather shoe, but a golf shoe!”

“She said it was a golf shoe?”

“Yes. A damn brown leather golf shoe and that’s exactly what it was. I’m telling you there is no way she could have seen that thing, unless she was really dead or something.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes, Winston, let’s not get crazy. We have enough real problems without adding all this voodoo-hoodoo out-of-body near-death crap.”

“Well, it may be voodoo hoodoo to you, but I’m telling you, Franklin, the shoe was there!”

Franklin got up and walked over to the door and locked it; then he walked over and poured Winston a drink.

“Here, just calm down and tell me again what she said.”

“She said she saw a brown leather shoe with spikes lying by a chimney on the roof, and that’s exactly where it was.”

“OK. Something’s not adding up, I’m beginning to smell a rat here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Who’s to say that they didn’t plan this entire thing? That the shoe thing is some sort of scam, that she didn’t plant the thing up there herself?”

“How? When? The nurses swore she never left the room.”

“Maybe it was the niece or the niece’s husband, or maybe they are in cahoots with someone who works here and they put it up there. Maybe they hired a small plane and flew over and dropped it on the roof, or a hot-air balloon.”

“Why? For what reason?”

“Money, a book deal, or to get on Oprah.”

“Oh right, Franklin, an eighty-nine-year-old woman deliberately sticks her hand in a wasps’ nest, gets stung seventeen times, falls twenty feet out of a tree, and knocks herself out cold, just to get on Oprah? Besides, the door was locked, and nobody has a key but the janitor.”

“What other logical explanation could there be?”

“None! That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Is it still there?”

“No, I took it.”

“Why?”

“Why? Why? Because I don’t know why, it just scared the hell out of me.”

“Where is it now?”

“I hid it in the bathroom. Do you want to see it?”

“No, I don’t want to see it. But listen, if the Warrens try to pull anything, we’ll just say, be our guest, have a look on the roof if you like. In the meantime, we never saw any shoe, right? If this gets out, we’ll be overrun by every nut job in America camping out in the parking lot.”

Winston nodded. “I guess you’re right, but what should I do with the shoe?”

“Get rid of it. Forget about it.”

“Wouldn’t that be illegal?” asked Sprague.

“Good Lord, man, you’re the lawyer. No, you found a shoe…it’s trash…you got rid of it. End of story.”

After Sprague left the office, Pixton sighed. With all his other problems, now his lawyer had flipped out over some weird coincidental shoe sighting. He had no patience for that sort of thing, all the so-called miracles: statues crying, crop circles, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, each and every one proven to be hoaxes and scams. It never ceased to amaze him just how gullible people really were. They would pray to a can of green beans if they thought it was going to cure them or get them into heaven. “God,” he thought, “when are people going to crawl out of the dark ages of ignorance?” Franklin had minored in philosophy at Yale, and if he had his way, every school in America would begin teaching kids Diderot, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Goethe. The current lack of education alarmed him. Most of the young people he dealt with nowadays could hardly string a proper sentence together, much less think for themselves. He was afraid we were going to wind up a nation of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Thank goodness Sprague was a Harvard man, and underneath it all, a man of reason.