Norwood (2 page)

“What's wrong, bubba?”

“Every time you grease a truck stuff falls in your eyes and your hair and down your back. You got it pretty easy yourself. You know that?”

“Why don't you get a hat?”

“I got plenty of hats, Vernell. I don't need any more hats. If all I needed was another hat I would be well off.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to get on the
Louisiana Hayride.
”

“Well, why don't you go over there and get on it, then?”

“You can't just go over there and get on it. They have to know something about you. You have to audition. They don't just let anybody on it that wants to. I guess you thought people just showed up at KWKH and said I want to be on the
Hayride.
”

“You're as good as some of 'em I've heard on it.”

“I know I'm
good
enough to be on it. That's not it.”

“Well look, let me have a half a dollar so I can go to the show with Lorene.”

“Let you have a half a dollar?”

“I'm going to the show with Lorene.”

“I wish I had somebody around to give me half a dollar. I have to work for mine. They don't give me anything down there at the station. I have to work for every dime and then pay taxes on that. I never even see that tax money.”

“I know, you told me about that.”

“You don't act like it. I'll tell you something else. Maybe I would have some money if people paid me what they owed me. Joe William Reese owes me seventy dollars and has never paid me to this day.”

“You told me about that.”

“He'll never pay me that money.”

“Maybe he will sometime.”

“Naw he won't.”

“He might. You ought to write him or call him. He might of forgot it his own self.”

“You don't even know him, Vernell. If you knew him you wouldn't say that.”

After Vernell had gone to the show Norwood went back to the station and used the phone. He called the Reese residence in Old Carthage, Arkansas. An old woman answered who talked very fast. She said Joe William had come, shed his uniform, and gone, and was now believed to be in New York City.

“What is he doing up there?”

“Lord, I don't know. Don't ask me.”

“When will he be back?”

“He didn't say. We don't look for him any time soon.
I
don't anyway. Old Carthage is too little for Joe William. Who is this?”

“This is Norwood Pratt over in Ralph, Texas. I wanted to talk to him about some money he owes me.”

“Who? Joe William?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“What was your name?”

“Pratt. Norwood Pratt.”

“I don't believe we know any Pratts in Texas. There's a J. B. Pratt here that sweeps out the courthouse. He used to come around and sharpen scissors. I don't know when I've seen that old man. He always did good work.”

“Joe William and me was in the arm service together.”

“Say you were?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Well, I don't know what to tell you. I'm his grandmother. But I'm a Whichcoat. That is I married a Whichcoat. My daughter was a Whichcoat before she married Joe William's father. The Reeses all came in here from Tennessee after the war. The sawmill was here then, and the compress too. Well, one compress is still here for that matter, but they tore the big one down, oh Lord,
years
ago. My maiden name is Finch. You've probably heard of old Judge Finch. He was on the Fourth Circuit here for so long? All the papers have written him up.”'

“Have you got Joe William's address there?”

“I'll have to ask Daughter about that.”

Norwood wrote Joe William a card at the New York address and watched the mail with anxiety for three weeks. It was worse than waiting on something from Sears. Nothing came. He wrote another one and put an extra stamp on it this time. There was no answer. Clyde Rainey said, “What's bothering you, Norwood?”

“Nothing.”

“You don't seem to have your mind on your business.”

“I'm all right.”

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine, Clyde. If there was anything wrong with me I would go to the doctor.”

“You don't look right to me.”

One warm summer evening, shortly after the Ralph B&PW Club had given up on trying to teach Vernell how to type, Norwood was out in the yard cutting the grass with a push mower he had borrowed from the station. He took his shirt off and then put it on again. The mosquitoes were fierce. Vernell was sitting on the front porch with a dishpan in her lap, shelling peas. She said, “I wonder if Mama and Daddy can look down from heaven tonight and see how nice the yard looks.” Norwood stopped mowing. “I don't know, Vernell. Did you go down and talk to that woman at the hotel today like I told you to?”

“Well, I had some things to do. I'll go one day next week.”

“Naw you won't. You'll go the first thing in the morning.”

She cried and took some aspirins and went to bed, but Norwood hauled her out the next morning and made her dress and shave and he told her that she was going to be working at the New Ralph Hotel Coffee Shop that very day or he would know the reason why.

“I don't feel good, bubba,” she pleaded. “I don't know how to do it. I'm liable to get the orders wrong.”

“I got you this job and you're going down there. Just get that through your head.”

“What if I get the orders wrong?”

“Well, don't get'em wrong. Get'em right.”

“I don't think I can do it.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I can't.”

“Look, all you do is write on these tickets what they want and take it back to the cook's window. Anybody can do that. Listen. A man will come in and you will give him a glass of water and a menu. Then he will study it and decide what he wants. All right. If he wants number two, you put number two on this side of the ticket and then the price over here. He might want some tea too. All right, put a big T under the number two and the price of the tea over there under the number two price. Then when he's through you add up all the prices and put on the tax and that's his bill. You ask him if there will be anything else and then give him his bill.”

“I know all that.”

“You are too afraid of people, Vernell. That's your trouble.”

The job worked out too well. Money and position went to Vernell's head. She stopped crying. Her health and posture improved. She even became something of a flirt. She grew daily more confident and assertive and at home she would drop the names of prominent Lions and Kiwanians. Norwood listened in cold silence as she brought home choice downtown gossip and made familiar references to undertakers and lawyers and Ford dealers. Norwood had nothing to counter with. No one you could quote traded at the Nipper station. The customers were local Negroes and high school kids, and out-of-state felons in flight from prosecution and other economy-minded transients, most of whom carried their own strange motor oil in their back seats, oil that was stranger and cheaper than anything even in the Nipper inventory. Some weeks, with her tips, Vernell made more money than Norwood. It was a terrible state of affairs and Norwood would not have believed that things were to become worse almost overnight.

Then with absolutely no warning Vernell married a disabled veteran named Bill Bird and brought him home to live in the little house on the highway. Bill Bird was an older man. He had drifted into Ralph for no very clear reason after being discharged from the VA hospital in Dallas. He took a room at the New Ralph Hotel, monthly rate, and passed his time in the coffee shop, at the corner table under the fan, reading
Pageant
and
Grit
and pondering the graphs in
U.S. News & World Report
. Vernell took to Bill Bird at once. She liked his quiet, thoughtful air and his scholarship. She kept his cup filled with coffee and during lulls she would sit at his table and enjoy him. Bill Bird was at the same time attentive to Vernell in many little ways.

One afternoon she said, “I declare, Bill, you just read all the time. It must make your eyes hurt.”

Bill Bird shook himself out of a hypnotic reading trance and put his paper down and rose to offer her a chair. “Sit down, Vernell. Relax for a minute. You're working too hard.”

“Well, I will for just a minute.”

Bill Bird tapped the newspaper with his pipe. “I was reading an interesting little piece there in the
Grit
. A retired high school band director in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has taught his fox terrier to play “Springtime in the Rockies” on the mouth harp. He holds it on with a little wire collar device. Like this.”

“Well, I'll be,” said Vernell. “A dog playing songs. I'd like to see that. I bet that's cute.”

“That wasn't what I meant,” said Bill Bird. “I mean I suppose it
is
cute, but it's more than that. It goes to show that animals are a lot smarter than people think. I honestly believe that one day we may be able to talk to them. By that I mean
communicate
in some fashion. There's a lot of interesting research going on in that field.”

“What else can he sing, that dog?”

“Well, it doesn't say. It just says he is limited to a few simple melodies because of his small lungs. Now he doesn't
sing,
Vernell. He
plays
these songs on a mouth organ. A harmonica. His name is Tommy.”

“I'd like to hear that scamp play. They ought to put him on television sometime.”

Bill Bird hummed the opening of “Springtime in the Rockies” and thought about it for a minute. “That's not exactly a simple tune, you know. I think it represents a pretty amazing range for a dog.”

“You must know something about every subject in the world, Bill. Somebody could sit here and write a book just listening to you.”

“Oh I don't know about that, Vernell. I will admit this: I have always been curious about things. The world about me. Like most of your scientists I am interested in the
why
of things, and not just the
what
. Sometimes I think I might have been happier if I didn't have such a searching mind.”

“You couldn't be any other way. You know that.”

“Some people go through their entire lives and are completely satisfied with the
what
. They don't ask questions.”

“They don't know any better.”

“They are content to go along in the old patterns, the same old ruts, never realizing how much richer and fuller their lives could be.”

“That's all they know.”

“How much does your man on the street know of psychology?”

“Nothing. They don't know anything.”

“How many of them can even vote intelligently? I was reading in
Parade
the other day that more people can identify Dick Tracy than the Vice President.”

“People ought to read more. And not just the funnies either.”

Norwood knew Bill Bird on sight and he had heard Vernell speak of him often enough but he had no idea anything was up. And now here he was, this middle-aged stranger, in Norwood's home, at his breakfast table, in his bathroom. It was not clear how or where or even in what war Bill Bird had fallen. Sometimes he spoke of Panama. There seemed to be nothing much wrong with him, apart from irregularity and low metabolism. He had all his limbs, his appetite was good.

Bill Bird received a lot of official brown mail, and, no doubt, a regular check, but he did not offer to pay anything toward the general household expenses. After meals he would excuse himself and go to the bedroom and close the door. He kept a little duffel bag in there filled with supplementary treats for his own exclusive use—Vienna sausages, olives, chocolate chip cookies. He had no problem adjusting from hotel life to home life. He bumped around the house, sockless, in some tan, army-looking dress shoes and an old corduroy VA robe. He was in and out of the bathroom with his magazines. He made an hourly circuit through the kitchen to look in the stove and the refrigerator and all the cabinets and the breadbox and indeed into everything that had a door.

Norwood did not like the sound of Bill Bird's voice. Bill Bird was originally from some place in Michigan and Norwood found his brisk Yankee vowels offensive. They argued about the bathroom. Bill Bird had made himself a little home in that bathroom. He used all the hot water. He filled up the cabinet with dozens of little bottles with typing on them, crowding Norwood's shaving gear out and onto the windowsill. He used Norwood's blades. He left hairs stuck around in the soap—short, gray, unmistakable Bill Bird hairs. Norwood had built the bathroom, it was his, and the thought of Bill Bird's buttocks sliding around on the bottom of the modern Sears tub was disagreeable. They argued about the Marine Corps. Bill Bird said it was vastly overrated. He cited personal experiences and magazine articles. For all the Marines' talk of the Halls of Montezuma, he said, there had actually been only a handful of Marines at the siege of Chapultepec. Regular army troops, as usual, had won the day there.

Norwood said he had been told by people who knew that certain army units in Korea in 1950 had abandoned their weapons and equipment and even their wounded while under Chinese attack. Many of the wounded had been rescued by Marines. Bill Bird said he knew this to be untrue. He also informed Norwood that it was a Federal offense to strike a disabled veteran, not to say ruinous damage-wise in the courts. They argued too about Norwood's plan to leave his job at the Nipper station and strike out blindly for Shreveport and a musical career on the
Louisiana Hayride,
the celebrated Country and Western show presented Saturday nights on KWKH, a 50,000-watt clear channel station serving the Ark-LaTex. It was foolish, Bill Bird said, to leave a job before you were sure you had another job. Vernell said that made plenty of sense to her. Bill Bird said that if you had a job you could always get a job, Vernell concurred. He went on to say that it was hard to get a job if you did not already have a job. “Bill is right about that,” said Vernell. They argued about the seventy-dollar debt and ways and means of collecting it. Bill Bird said the best approach would be to pay some lawyer ten or fifteen dollars to write that fellow a scare letter. “Then I would be out eighty-five dollars,” said Norwood. Well, said Bill Bird, he, for one, was tired of hearing about that confounded seventy dollars.