There used to be an old TV show called The Fugitive, the premise of which was that, in order to prove his innocence, the falsely accused eponymous hero had to find his wife’s “real” killer, a man known simply as “the one-armed man.” (No, he didn’t look for him on all the golf courses in Florida–this was pre-O.J.). Of course, just like in the O.J. case, no one ever really believed The Fugitive, either–especially the part about the one-armed man.
And who could blame them? After all, every aspect of his story (I’m talking about The Fugitive here–I’ll leave O.J. alone for a while) seemed wholly implausible–pure Hollywood fabrication. Or, at least it did–until recently. That’s when we began to experience something very similar in our own house. In our case, however, instead of being plagued by a nefarious one-armed murderer, we have been haunted by his less fortunate younger brother: the one-legged shoe thief.
I know: it sounds bizarre, but, having examined all the evidence I can come to no other conclusion than that we must be the victims of a one-legged bandit: how else could you explain the fact that our house is constantly the setting for “The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Shoe”?
There’s really no other explanation; after all, no one in their right mind would ever take off just one shoe, walk around for a bit, and then take the other one off in a completely different location–would they? No, of course they wouldn’t, which means that, logically, where you find one shoe, you should also be able find the other, just as when you are missing one shoe, you should also be missing the other. In our house, however, this is seldom the case–or, at least it isn’t the case for my daughter, Clementine, who so far has been the sole victim of the one-legged bandit.
Of course, the less open-minded among you might be tempted to say that this only goes to prove that it is not a mysterious one-legged foot-fetishist on the prowl, but rather a neglectful child; to you I can only reply that, on the contrary, this simply narrows down the potential list of one-legged subjects to those who wear a girls size 3.
You’d think, with a physical description like that, our man would be easy enough to nab: all we would have to do once we had noticed the theft of yet another shoe would be to canvas the neighborhood, stopping to question all of the one-legged men wearing one small pink flip-flop (or baseball cleat, or Doc Marten). This, however, is wishful thinking: I’m sure that one wouldn’t get very far in the world of disabled thievery without being at least a little bit clever; in other words, no one-legged man worth his crutch would be foolish enough to be caught in the vicinity of his crime with his loot still on him. Not that it would matter much if he did, since our man is also clever enough to only strike at the most hectic time of day–right in the middle of the before school rush– when, thanks to the tsunami of book bags, half-eaten lunches and unsigned permission slips that surge back and forth throughout the house all morning, he is able to slip in and out completely undetected.
Still, even without being caught in the act, or even in the neighborhood, you would think that in a town of this size it would be easy to catch someone whose only leg ended in a little-girl-sized foot. The fact that we haven’t means that he must be holing up somewhere where he can pass unnoticed (perhaps by spending the majority of his time sitting down), and presumably one where odd footwear doesn’t look out of place.
Maybe O.J. was on to something with all those golf courses after all.