Norwood (6 page)

“I'm getting tired of that peckerwood business.”

“Well, stop calling me Laverne then.”

“I don't see how anybody from Belzoni, Mississippi, can call anybody else a peckerwood. How big is Belzoni? . . . It couldn't be too big. You'd hear more about it if it was.”

“For your information, I spent a lot of time in New Orleans,
Mr. Red on the Head.
I count that as my home.”

“It's
not
your home though.”

“If you live someplace a long time you can count it as your home.”

“Naw you can't. . . . You could live in Hong Kong for seventy-five years and Belzoni would still be your home.”

“Don't sit there and tell
me
what
my
home is.”

“I
am
telling you. Somebody needs to tell you.”

“I hope a cop stops you. I really do. They'll have you locked up down there in that Atlanta pen so fast it'll make your head swim. You're sitting over there right now just scared to death.”

There was some truth in this. It was a tough problem. Norwood would think about it for a while and rest for a while. It was like looking at the sun. He waited on something to come to him, some plan. What road was he on? Where was the gas gauge on this oversize jet plane dashboard? Half a tank? Where had he stopped? Somewhere. The man had checked him out on the revoked credit card list. Like he was somebody who shouldn't have a credit card. Anyway, nothing much could happen as long as they were moving along like this. Darkness fell and the problem lost much of its urgency. Norwood's mind was soon on other things.

They made only one stop in Kentucky, a peach stop in some little place just across the Ohio River, and, lost in their own thoughts, said nothing to each other until they were approaching Evansville, Indiana. The radio had been droning on for hours untended and a gospel hour was in progress when Miss Phillips reached over and turned the dial.

Norwood said, “What are you doing?”

“I'm trying to get WWL in New Orleans,” she said.

“You can pick it up a long ways late at night. I want to hear
Moonglow with Martin.
”

Norwood pushed her hand away and regained the gospel program. “I was listening to that.”

“We been hearing preachers all night.” She changed stations again.

Norwood turned it back. “This one is explaining why they don't have any pianos in the Church of Christ. I want to hear him. Don't put your hand on the radio again.”

“Well, I
don't
want to hear him.”

“I do though.”

“You're not the boss.”

“I'm the boss of this car.”

Miss Phillips fumed. The preacher went on uninterrupted. In closing he said he was prepared to pay ten thousand dollars cash to anyone who could show him scriptural authority for having a musical instrument in a church.

“I wisht I knew more about the Bible,” said Norwood.

He considered and mused on the offer for some little time. “I wonder if he would really pay you? . . . It looks like he'd have to if he said it over the air. . . . Well . . . I'd whup his ass if he didn't.”

“I'm tired of this preaching,” said Miss Phillips.

“Hank Snow's son is a preacher,” said Norwood. “The Reverend Jimmie Rodgers Snow. He's got him a church off over there in Tennessee somewhere.”

“I want to hear some music.”

“What church do you belong to, Laverne?”

“None of your business.”

“The Church of God?”

“I belong to just as good a church as you do. Probably a lot better one.”

“Well, maybe you do and maybe you don't. I belong to the Third Baptist Church in Ralph, Texas, and I'm proud of it.”

“I figured you would belong to the Fourth Baptist Church.”

“They don't have one in Ralph.”

“That's why you don't belong to it.”

“The Missionary Baptists, they all go over to Hooks. I think the Free Will Baptists just get together at somebody's house. We're gonna have air conditioning in the new annex if they ever get it finished. Do they have air conditioning in the Pentecost Church in Belzoni?”

“My church comes under the head of my business.”

“If I was a Holy Roller I wouldn't be ashamed of it. I would be proud of it.”

“I would too, if I was a Holy Roller.”

“Only half the people that
are
in the church are saved.”

“Has that car back there got a radio in it?”

Norwood checked it out in the mirror. “It's got a aerial, yeah.”

“Well, stop and let me go get in it. I want to hear
Moonglow with Martin.
”

“You can't ride back there. It'll look funny. Some cop is liable to stop us.”

“I don't care. If you don't stop I'll holler out at the next cop I see. At the next anybody.”

“All right, change the station. Get whatever you want on this radio.”

“I want to get back in that other car. I want to hear it on
that
radio now.”

Norwood pulled over and stopped. He got the fiber envelope out of the glove compartment and gave her the keys to the Pontiac. “Here. All you're gonna do is run that battery down and probably get us arrested.” They rode into Evansville like that, Norwood in his car, Miss Phillips in hers. There was nothing doing in downtown Evansville. Night lights were burning in the stores but the streets were still and deserted. Miss Phillips began blatting her horn. It boomed and rang and echoed, and Norwood's first impulse was to step on it, but he stopped. Miss Phillips got back in the Olds.

“What's wrong with you now?”

“I want some coffee,” said Miss Phillips. “I don't like it back there in that car with nobody driving it.”

At an all-night diner on the edge of town they sat on stools and had coffee and cold sugary fried pies. Miss Phillips was morose. She had knots on her head fore and aft, and her legs were sticky with dried peach juice. The green party dress looked awful. Norwood snapped at the counter girl for putting cream in his coffee. She said she didn't know where he was from but if you wanted it black you had to say so. He told her he was from a place where they let you put your own cream in your coffee. From little syrup pitchers with spring lids.

Miss Phillips, wistfully eating her fried pie, was not listening to this byplay. “Sammy would get me a job right off,” she said. “But I wouldn't want Grady to know where I was. I guess you would tell him.”

“I wouldn't tell him what time it was,” said Norwood. “After the way he done me.”

“He's a disbarred lawyer and he knows a thousand ways to get you in trouble. I'd be afraid you would tell him where I went.”

“Naw, I said wouldn't. I wisht you
would
go on. It would be a load off my mind.”

“I'm sorry I talked so ugly to you, Red. Why don't you let me have one of those cars?”

Norwood put the keys on the counter. “I don't want anything more to do with
you
or them cars. Take both of'em, Laverne, and go on. You can give one to Sammy. Tell him hello for me.”

“I can't drive but one. You'll have to unhook 'em.”

It was a job getting the reflex tow bar off. All he had was a pair of pliers. Somebody with big shoulders and a four-way lug wrench had jammed those nuts down to stay. It was no use, not with pliers. He kicked it and beat it with a rock. Finally he attacked it with a jack handle and chanted
“This time . . . this time . . . this time . . .”
until it broke loose. Miss Phillips had no goodbye for Norwood. She took the Oldsmobile without a word or a wave and roared off into the Midwestern night flinging driveway gravel. The tow bar, its ingenious patented action now so much junk, was dragging along behind, bouncing on the highway and kicking up sparks.

Norwood drove the Pontiac out past the last lights of town and turned off on a dirt road. He turned off that road onto a two-rut road and then into what looked like a blackberry patch. He gunned it through the thicket and over arm-size saplings, giving the Indiana forest folk a scare, until it hit some bigger trees and stopped. He forced his door open against the bushes and got out and looked around. This was not such a smart idea. What would a car be doing here? Somebody would report it first thing tomorrow. He tried to back it out but the rear wheels were sunk hub deep in sand and wouldn't rock free. Well, he was tired of fooling with it. He took a towel from his bag and gave the door handles and the interior a good wiping down. It had been a proud day when he had given the Marine Corps his fingerprints and now they were up there in some drawer in Washington waiting to do him in. He ran his hand under the seat to see if he had left any clues. Any peanuts or guitar picks or things they could look at through a microscope. It smelled a little of Miss Phillips down there. He burned the fiber envelope and its contents and then he zipped up his bag and slung the guitar across his back and walked a good three miles back toward town to the nearest filling station. He stood on the highway under the station's harsh blue mercury lights and swatted bugs out of his face.

THE SUN WAS COMING UP before he got a ride. It was a bread truck. The driver was a round sloping man who was wearing an official bread hat with a sunburst medallion and a T-shirt that was so thin hairs were breaking through it. A bulldozer watch fob lay on his lap. Norwood thought at first he had rubber bands around his wrists. They were fat and dimpled like baby wrists.

“This is against the rules,” said the bread man, “but I just can't pass a man up. My wife says I'm too kind for my own good.”

“Well, I sure appreciate it,” said Norwood. “I was getting pretty tired.”

The truck was a delivery model with no passenger seat and Norwood had to sit on a wooden bread box. He laid the guitar across his knees. There was a bad shimmy in the front wheels and this made the guitar bounce and hum.

“I'll have to make a few stops, but a man begging a ride ought to be glad to get whatever he can.”

“This is fine. I appreciate it too.”

“Have you got a dollar to help on the gas?”

Norwood gave him a dollar. “Do you have to pay for your own gas?”

The man looked straight ahead. “Sometimes I do.”

“How much does a job like this pay?” said Norwood. “A bread job?”

“Well, it don't pay as much as heavy construction work but you don't have to work as hard neither. I used to drive a D-8 cat till I hurt my back. Didn't do anything while I was on workmen's compensation. Just went to the show all the time. I like
The Road Runner
.”

“Yeah, I do too.”

“I could watch that scutter for an hour.”

“I believe I could too.”

The bread man began to rumble with quiet laughter. “That coyote or whatever he is, a wolf or something, every time he gets up on a clift or somewhere with a new plan, why the Road Runner comes along on some skates or has him some new invention like a rocket or a big wrecker's ball and just busts that coyote a good one.” He laughed some more, then fell into repose. In a minute or two his face clouded with a darker memory. “Noveltoons are not any good at all,” he said. “It's usually a shoemaker and a bunch of damn mice singing. When one of them comes on I get up and go get me a sack of corn or something.”

They shimmied on down the road. At the first stop, a roadside grocery store, Norwood got a quart of milk and had the grocer make him a couple of baloney and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise. He leaned on the meat box and ate and watched the bread man do his stuff. The bread man carried old bread out and brought new bread in. He squatted down and arranged it on the rack. Norwood noticed that he was poking finger holes in the competitors' loaves. Their eyes met, just for a second, and the bread man looked away. He tried to recover by doing peculiar things with his hands, as though he had a funny way of arranging bread. Norwood was not deceived. The bread man had no gift for pantomime and he did not seem to consider that from a range of eight or nine feet it is easy enough to tell whether someone is or is not punching holes in bread.

He said nothing about it and neither did Norwood. But back on the road the guilty knowledge hung heavy over the conversation. The bread man tried to get something going again. He asked Norwood if that was a Gibson guitar, but before Norwood could answer the man said, “My whole family is musical. Some families are like that. My sister used to play trombone solos in church. Daddy played the accordion and we would all sing. He could really play that thing. And didn't know note one.”

“They're hard to beat,” said Norwood, agreeably. “I like to hear a good accordion.”

“Daddy passed on two days after Labor Day of 1951,” said the bread man, forestalling any suggestion that they go hear the old gentleman play.

They picked up another hitchhiker. This one was carrying a sack of garden tomatoes. Norwood made room for him on the box. The man was grateful and deeply apologetic and he insisted on shaking their hands. Norwood had never seen a man so happy to get a ride. “This sure is nice of you,” he kept saying.

“I'm not supposed to do it,” said the bread man. “I just don't like to pass anybody up. Might need a ride myself sometime. How far are you going?”

“I'm going on in to Indianapolis. My wife is in the hospital there. She doesn't have any sweat glands.”

“I never had a cold in my life,” said the bread man.

“It was sure nice of you to stop like that. A lot of people are scared of hitchhikers. I guess you can't blame 'em.”