Norwood Read online

  “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.

  The compactness of the Pratt house was such that three-way conversations could be and very often were carried on from three different ro
oms, with none of the parties visible to the others. “You beat anything I ever saw, bubba,” said Vernell, who was in the bedroom ironing on this night. “We’re both of us making good money now and we got the house fixed up and you’ve got your car and Bill’s here and you just want to throw it all to one side and take off for Shreveport. You don’t even know anybody in Shreveport.”

  Norwood was sitting at the kitchen table eating a warmed-over supper. He’d been late getting home from the station and they had not waited. He kept his hat on while he ate, his pale green Nipper hat with the black bill. It was a model the Miami Police Department had used in 1934. He held his left thumb in a glass of ice water. The thumb, sticky with shaving cream, was swelling and throbbing and purpling. He had fixed flats that day for three big state gravel trucks, one after the other, and when he was breaking down one of the wheels a locking ring had snapped back on his thumb.

  “Well, when you get in Shreveport and run out of money,” came the Michigan voice of Bill Bird, through a cloud of bathroom steam, “Vernell and I will not be able to send you any.”

  Norwood speared a sausage patty with his fork and gave it a hard flip through the bathroom doorway.

  “Hey!” said Bill Bird. “All right now!” He emerged from the steam in some green VA convalescent pants that were cinched up with a drawstring. Except for his tan shoes, that was all he had on. He was holding the sausage on his open palm, level, like a compass, and he was studying it. “Did you throw this, Norwood?”

  “What is it, Bill?”

  “You know what it is. It’s a sausage.”

  “I wondered what that was,” said Norwood. “I saw a arm come in the back door there and chunk something acrost the room. I thought maybe there was a note on it.”

  Bill Bird called into the bedroom. “Vernell, come in here a minute. I want you. Norwood’s throwing food.”

  Vernell came in and looked at Bill Bird’s naked torso. “Goodness, Bill, put on some clothes. Norwood’s trying to eat his supper.”

  “Look at this,” said Bill Bird.

  “That’s a sausage,” she said,

  “I know what it is. He threw it at me in the bathroom.”

  “What for? What would he want to throw a sausage for?”

  “I don’t know, Vernell. It’s beyond me. I do know you could very easily put someone’s eye out like that.”

  She gave a little laugh. “I don’t think you could put anybody’s eye out with a sausage.” Then she saw from Bill Bird’s face that this was not the ticket. She turned to Norwood. “What made you want to do it, bubba?”

  Norwood went on eating. “You two would drive anybody crazy,” he said. “Going on all night about a sausage.”

  “It’s something you would expect out of a child,” said Bill Bird. “You know I’ve tried to get along with him, Vernell, but you can’t treat him like a responsible adult. He should be made to apologize for this. Now would be the time for it.”

  “Bubba, tell Bill you’re sorry. Come on now. It won’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t know why I ought to apologize if some stranger comes along and throws a sausage in the house at him. All I saw was his sleeve, Bill. I couldn’t tell what color it was, it happened so fast.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to become of your brother, Vernell,” said Bill Bird. “He’s going to wind up in the penitentiary. They have some people there who will set him straight on a few things. You can count on that. I read an article the other day about the seven danger signs of criminal tendencies in the young. I’ve marked it in there for you to read. I think you will be a little disturbed, you should be, to learn that your own brother has the same personality profile as Alvin Karpis.”

  “Bubba was just playing with you, Bill.”

  “I’ll say this: Unless his attitude undergoes a great change he will be in the pen within five years, just as sure as we’re standing here. Now. We’ll consider this incident closed.”

  Norwood made himself two biscuit and Br’er Rabbit Syrup sandwiches and went out on the front porch to eat them and wait on the bath water to get hot. Down the highway beyond the Nipper station the lights of the skating rink made a dull yellow glow. Insect bulbs of low wattage. The music came and went in heavy waves. It was a record of a boogie-woogie organist playing “Under the Double Eagle.” Norwood threw one of the biscuit sandwiches out to a red dog that was traveling through town, going east, possibly to Texarkana, and watched him eat it in one gulp. Then he went out and started the Fleetline and listened for a minute to the clatter of the burnt rod and the loose tappets—it sounded like a two-cylinder John Deere tractor—and drove down to the skating rink. Sometimes, after the first session, you could pick up a country girl there looking for a ride home.

  It was a clear warm Friday night and there was a big crowd. The tent flaps were rolled up all the way around. Some of the bolder girls were wearing short pleated skirts that bounced. The boys were skating fast, working hard at it, as though they were delivering important telegrams. Out front some Future Farmers of America were horsing around beside a billet truck, playing keep-away with a softball. The boy they were keeping it away from was smoking a cigarette and was also wearing an FFA jacket. “Here, you want it? I’m really gonna let you have it this time.” The boy would never learn. They were keeping it away from him because he looked like a baboon. Norwood wandered around to the back of the tent and stood by himself leaning against a big pecan tree and watching the skaters through the chicken wire. He was there only a minute or two, checking out the girls, when he heard someone cracking nuts on the other side of the tree.

  He peered around for a look. A very thin and yet very broad man was standing there expertly cracking pecans in his hands and getting the meats out whole. He was as flat and wide as a gingerbread man. He was wearing a smooth brown saddle-stitched sport jacket and some blue slacks with hard creases and a pearl-gray cattleman’s hat. He grinned and dusted the hulls from his huge flat hands and extended one to Norwood.

  “Hello there, Norwood.”

  Norwood shook his hand. “I thought I heard somebody back there. Do you know me?”

  “Well, I feel like I do. I see your name stitched there over your pocket. Of course you might have someone’s else’s shirt on. In that case your name might very well be Earl or Dub for all I know.”

  “Naw, it’s my shirt all right.”

  “My name is Fring. I’m glad to know you, Norwood. Tell me, is everyone at home well?”

  “Just getting along fine. How about your folks?”

  “They’re all dead except for me and my brother Tilmon. I’m fine and he’s doing very well, considering his age. Here, take this home and read it when you get a minute.” He handed Norwood a pamphlet. It said, A noncancellable guaranteed renewable for life hospitilization policy, underwritten by one of the Mid-South’s most reliable insurance firms. No age limit. PAYS up to $5,000.00 for sickness or accident. PAYS up to $400.00 for surgery. PAYS prescription benefits. PAYS home nurse benefits. PAYS iron lung fees. PAYS . . . “You don’t have to read it now. Take it home and study it later. Compare it with your present program, in light of your current insurance needs. Talk it over with those at home. That little policy just sells itself.”

  Norwood put it in his pocket. “A insurance man.”

  “Well, among other things, yes. My brother Tilmon and I have a good many business interests. I’m also in mobile homes and coin-operated machines. I am a licensed private investigator in three states. We have a debt collection agency in Texarkana. I know you’ve heard of our car lots over there. Grady Fring?”

  “You’re not Grady Fring the Kredit King?”

  “I am indeed.”

  “No reasonable offer refused.”

  “The very same.”

  “You can’t convince Grady your credit is bad.”

  “Right again.”

  Norwood laughed. “Well, this is something, I’ve seen your signs and heard your things on the radio a lot. Grady has gone
crazy and all that.”

  “I would certainly be disappointed if you hadn’t heard them,” said Grady. “If I told you what our advertising budget was last year, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s where you’ve got to put your money if you want to move the goods. You know what I believe in?”

  “What?”

  “Volume.”

  “What?”

  “Volume. Volume. I don’t care what I make off anything—six dollars, a quarter, a dime—as long as I can move it. Sell it! Move it! Give it away! But just clear it on out of the way and bring something else in, and then we’ll sell it too. Yessir, I do believe in volume. Why aren’t you out there skating with all those pretty girls?”

  “I’m not too good a skater.”

  “Do you come out here much?”

  “Some. Every now and then.”

  “I’ll bet you know all those girls out there.”

  “I know some of ’em.”

  “This is my first visit,” said Grady, “to this particular roller drome. I get around a good deal at night, you see. I am also connected with a New Orleans talent agency and that part of my work takes me around to many ... highway institutions. What our agency does—it’s fully licensed—is seek out and recruit lovely young girls over the Mid-South. Girls seeking a career in show business. Girls who want to leave home. You may not realize it but we have some of the sweetest little girls in the country right around in these parts.”

  “We sure do.”

  “I’d put them up against girls from anywhere.”

  “That Cresswell girl is a good skater,” said Norwood. “She’s about the best one around here. That one there with the lights on her skates.”

  “Yes, I’ve had my eye on her. She’s a dandy. And sweet too. Do you know her folks? What does her daddy do?”

  “I don’t know what he does. Her mama works down at the Washateria.”

  “How old is she?”