Norwood (10 page)

“I want my fifty cents,” said Raimundo.

“Don't start in on that again. You'll get your money.”

“When?”

“Soon.” He pulled both windows down and came back to the kitchen and resumed work on the cottage cheese. “Little bastards. I hope they all get respiratory diseases this winter.”

“If it was me,” said Norwood, “I would be ashamed of myself borrowing money from little boys.”

“I don't actually borrow it from them. They don't have any to speak of. Raimundo runs a few errands for me.”

“Say, is it okay if I shave here?”

“Yeah, that's it right there, the kitchen sink. The john itself is in the back. When you get through we'll go up and see if Marie is in and take her over to Stanley's. I don't feel like doing that piece anyway.”

Marie was agreeable in many ways, if a little odd. Through deafness or inattention she never heard anything the first time.
“What?”
she would say.
“What's that?”
She took Norwood up to The Cloisters and twice for rides on the Staten Island Ferry, always wearing the same loose orange silky blouse. She didn't work anywhere and she didn't seem to have any friends. She didn't do anything. Once on the boat Norwood put his arm around her waist and she removed it and said he took a lot for granted and that she would let him know when she was ready to be “pawed.” He tried it again the next day but she still wasn't ready. They played guitar duets in her apartment, with Norwood plunking chords, and they sang folk songs from a book.

“You don't really like folk songs, do you?” she said.

“They're all right,” he said, “I like modern love numbers better.”

Marie was a speech major from Northwestern and one night she read aloud from her favorite book, which was something called
The Prophet,
and Norwood listened and clipped his fingernails. She fed him and seemed to welcome his company but nothing ever got off the ground in the way of funny business. Every night he traipsed back downstairs and slept on Heineman's couch. It was rough and nubbly and left red waffle marks on his face and hands. It was too short too. On the fourth day he got up and toppled on the floor. His legs were dead from the knees down. When circulation was restored he went upstairs and told Marie he was leaving. She said, “What?” and he said, “I said I got to go.”

“Oh. You're leaving.”

“Yeah, I got to get on down the road.”

“Oh. Well. You'll have to write me a long letter about Shreveport.”

“Yeah, I'll have to do that.”

“About the program and all.”

“Okay.”

“Well. All the best, Norwood.”

“Yeah, you take it easy, I'll see you sometime.”

HE WALKED to Union Square in a light drizzle and stopped at the Automat for a dish of baked beans with a hot dog on top. It was the best thing he had found to eat in New York and by far the cheapest. The place was packed with damp bums who smelled like rancid towels and he had to wait for a seat. One fell vacant and he darted in and got it. Then he saw that he had forgotten his silverware. He left the dish of beans on top of an
Argosy
magazine to stake a table claim and went back to the cutlery stand. While he was gone the girl with the dirty dishes wagon picked up his beans and an Oriental gentleman across the table got the magazine. A man with a bowl of oatmeal got the seat. Norwood came back and thought at first he had the wrong table, then he recognized the Chinese gent. He grabbed the magazine from the foreigner's clever hands and turned to the oatmeal man. “You got my seat.” The man's fast reply was “I don't see your name on it.” Norwood stood there with his knife and fork and paper napkin.

Just then a big man in a blue suit, not a bum but some sort of manager, appeared in the middle of the room and started clapping his hands. “It's not raining out there now,” he said. “Everybody who's not eating—
outside
!” He clapped and bellowed and there was a sullen, shuffling movement toward the door. He spotted an immobile Norwood. “That goes for you too!”

Norwood said, “I had some beans here a minute ago. You can ask anybody at this table. Except this one. He got my seat.”

“It's not raining out there now. Let's go!”

“I ain't studying that rain, man. I'm trying to tell you that somebody got my chow that I paid good money for.”

“Don't give me a hard time.
Outside
!”

One of the bums who was being stampeded called back from the revolving door, “Hey, it
is
raining out here!”

Norwood put his heavy duty silverware down on the table and left. Within two hours he had said goodbye to the hateful town and was speeding south in a big Trailways cruiser. He was thinking about purple hull peas sprinkled down with pepper sauce.

There was nothing to see along the featureless turnpike to Washington except elbows in the passing cars below. He read his magazine. He dozed awhile. A famous athlete in the seat behind him, now reduced to traveling by motor coach, said, “Niggers have taken over all the sports except swimming. They don't know how to swim.”

In Washington there was a layover and a change of buses and a new driver. He was a cheerful fatso with his hat tipped back and although the signs said DO NOT TALK TO OPERATOR he started right in cracking jokes and carrying on with the passengers. Norwood wanted to get in on it and he went up front to scout for a seat but they were all taken. Maybe later. He had two seats to himself at the back. He took off his guitar and put his feet up in the seat, sitting crossways.

Darkness fell and a low white moon was running along with the bus just behind the tops of the scraggly Virginia pines. Norwood had his head wedged in against the seat and the window, using his hat. He watched the moon and made it go up and down by closing one eye and then the other.
Moonlight in the pines . . . and you were so fine . . .
How did people write songs anyway?
. . . Moonlight in the pines . . . and in this heart of mine . . . you were so fine . . . your lips were sweet as wine . . . moonlight on the road . . . moonlight on the bus . . . moonlight on the trail. . . . A Republic Picture. . . . Hey, Gabby, the widder was looking for you. Aw tarnation, Roy. Roy and Dale and the Sons of the Pioneers having a good laugh on Gabby. Roy's real name was Leonard Slye. . . .

The bus slowed and pulled over and stopped on the shoulder. A girl with a flashlight and a shopping bag full of clothes and a blue and white overnight case got on, talking away and stumbling on the cord from some unseen appliance in the bag. She would have fallen had not the driver, the fat and courteous J. T. Spears, jumped from his seat to catch her.

“You didn't have to run so hard, little lady,” he said, “I saw you coming.”

She was out of breath. “I thought I had plenty of time. I got to talking there on the porch and then I saw your yellow lights come over the hill and I just took off aflying. They were all laughing and hollering at me,
‘Run, Rita Lee, run,'
and then that cord from my hair drier came aloose . . .”

She was a pretty little girl with short black hair and bangs and bejeweled harlequin glasses. A little thin in the leg but not too thin. She was wearing a bright yellow dress with a white daisy on one side of the skirt part.

Norwood stood up in a kind of crouch and tried to indicate that he was friendly and that he had a good place to sit back there. She came down the aisle and stopped and he stowed her gear in the overhead rack and she thanked him and took the seat in front of him, next to a woman with blue hair.

They hit it off fine, the girl Rita Lee and the woman, and began at once to exchange confidences. The woman was a dental assistant from Richmond with a twenty-year pin who had been to Washington to see how laws are made. It was her first visit to Congress. “People who live right around something don't care anything about it,” she said. “I bet if I lived at the Grand Canyon I wouldn't go out and look at it much. And other people would be driving thousands of miles to see it.” Her husband had disappeared two years before and was subsequently found working as an able seaman on a sulfur boat, through a rude postcard he had foolishly sent her from Algiers, Louisiana. He was now back home, but living in the garage and drinking.

The girl Rita Lee had been visiting her grandmother and certain cousins in Virginia. She was from near Swainsboro, Georgia. She was now on her way to Jacksonville, North Carolina, for a showdown with someone named Wayne at Camp Lejeune. Although she did not have a ring—she had not pressed him on that—they had had an understanding for more than a year now and she wanted to know what was up. There had been no letter for almost two months.

“What is he, a officer?” said the woman.

“Boy, that's a good one,” said Rita Lee. “Lord no, he's a Pfc down there in the Second Marines.”

Norwood stuck his head up in the notch between the two seats. “Do you mean the Second
Marines
or Second Marine
Division?
” he said.

They looked up at him.

“When you say
Marines
that means regiment. If you mean
division
you have to say
division
. Now he could be in the Second Marines, Second Marine Division, I'm not saying that. But he might be in the Sixth or Eighth Marines too and still be in the Second Division, that's all I'm saying.”

“I don't know what it is right offhand,” said Rita Lee. “I'd have to look on a envelope. All I know is he drives a tank down there in the Second Marine something.”

“There's nothing wrong with tanks,” said Norwood. “Gunny Crankshaw used to be in tanks. That dude had a Silver Star. He shot down the gates of Seoul University. He had all his khakis cut down real tight and he would just strut around like a little banty rooster. Ever once in a while he would stop and take his handkerchief out and knock the dust off his shoes.”

There was a heavy silence. The bus swerved to avoid a big tire fragment in the road but bumped across it anyway.

“That's where somebody throwed a recap,” said Norwood. “They get hot enough and they'll just peel right off. You can't tell about a recap. But if I'm driving on gravel a lot I'd rather have one. They'll hold up better. It's harder rubber.”

“I think we've had about enough out of you,” said the dental assistant. “You're butting into a private conversation.”

“I was just trying to be friendly.”

“Well, you'll have to get back in your own seat. We can't talk with your head up there like that.”

At the bus station in Richmond Rita Lee had a Pepsi-Cola and a sack of peanuts. Norwood moved in on the stool beside her and ordered coffee.

“Whuddaya say.”

“Oh, you, hi. Say, I like your hat.” She poured the peanuts into the bottle and shook it and fizzed a little into her mouth from an inch or two away. The goobers boiled up in carbonated turmoil. “My hair is just a mess.”

“It don't look like a mess to me.”

“I washed it and rolled it up and had it looking so nice and now look at it. It was running for that bus. What are you doing with that cowboy hat on?”

“I thought you liked it.”

“I'll say this, it's a tall one.”

Norwood stirred his coffee and talked to her with his head turned just slightly; he knew he wouldn't be able to talk straight if he looked directly into her face.
What a honey!
It might even knock him off the seat. “This ain't a bad looking bus station for Richmond,” he said. “You'd be surprised how little that one is in New York.”

“I know a girl that went to New York and got a suckruhturrial job right off making ninety-five dollars a week. She was the FHA Charm Queen two years running.
And smart?
She didn't know what a B was.”

“They put butter on ham sandwiches up there,” he said. He put a dime in the remote jukebox unit and played a Webb Pierce selection.

“I know why you're wearing that hat. You're a singer yourself.”

“How did you know?”

“I saw your guitar on the bus.”

“I fool around with it some.” He looked in all his pockets and then forgot what he was looking for.

“Have you made any records?”

“Well, I'm just getting started. I may cut some platters when I get to Shreveport.”
Cut some platters?

“I bet you'll be a big star one of these days and your folks will be so proud of you.”

He wound his watch.

“Is that your home, Shreveport?”

“Naw, my home is Ralph, Texas, down there the other side of Texarkana. It ain't too far from Shreveport.”

“Have you got a wife anywhere?”

“Naw.”

“I was supposed to been married last March. It was all my fault, I said no we better wait. Wayne, see, he wants to do everything right now and after he thinks about it he don't want to do it any more.”

“That's a mighty nice dress you got on.”

“Thank you, I made it myself. He may have him some old girl down there. That handsome devil, all the girls wanted him back home but they couldn't get him from me. He would favor Rory Calhoun a lot if his neck was filled out more.”

Norwood was doing a pushup from the stool.

“What's wrong with you?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You keep doing things.”

Nothing was said about it but there was a tacit understanding that they would sit together when they got back on the bus. Norwood did not try anything right away, although much of his discomfort had passed. There in the half-light of the bus he could not see her face clearly. Her voice alone and presence did not stun and confound his brain.