Norwood Read online

  “Look out! Look out!” the Cardinal was saying. He had jumped back well clear of the action. “Turn him loose, Eugene! He’s another Hitler!”

  Norwood was dancing around jabbing at the man with his elbows trying to shake him off. He backed him up and bumped him against the crossties. The man’s ankles were locked together in front and Norwood broke them loose but the man had a hold on his neck that wouldn’t quit. “You better get him off before I bust his head open,” said Norwood, stopping to rest a minute. He was breathing hard. His upper lip was bloody.

  The Cardinal moved in a little closer. Maybe something could be worked out now. “Eugene don’t weigh very much, does he?” he said.

  “I still don’t want him on my back.”

  “He’s light enough to be a jockey. Of course he’s way too old.”

  “How long does he generally hang on?”

  “I don’t know. I never seen him do that before. . . . They say a snapping turtle won’t let go till it thunders. That’s what I’ve heard. I never was bit by a turtle. My oldest sister was bit by a mad fox. They didn’t have any screens on their house and it come in a window one night and nipped her on the leg like a little dog will do. They carried that fox’s head on in to Birmingham in some ice and said it was mad and she had to take all them shots. She said she hoped she never did get bit by nair another one.”

  Norwood kicked his feet forward and fell backward on the flour man and they hit the deck in a puff of white. The flour man was squeezed between Norwood and the pack and it knocked the wind out of him. He made a lung noise like gunh! He turned loose and sat up and brushed himself off a little, still defiant but not fighting any more. Norwood opened the knapsack and poked around in it. There were rolled-up clothes and a cast-iron skillet and pie pans and a can of Granger and cotton blankets and copies of True Police Cases and a mashed store cake and crackers and cans of chili and lima beans and an insulated plastic cup and a bottle of 666 Tonic and a clock and an old five-shot top-breaking .32 revolver with a heavy fluted barrel and taped-on grips. No boots. But in one of the side pouches he did find some shoes.

  They were old-timers’ high tops with elastic strips on the sides. Norwood tried them on and walked around flexing them and looking at them in profile. They were plenty loose. Eugene didn’t have feet, he had flippers. Norwood said, “I’ll give you two dollars for these dudes.”

  “Those are my house shoes,” said Eugene, speaking for the first time and the last.

  “A man comes along and needs some shoes, you ought to want to help him. You already got some good shoes on.”

  “Eugene doesn’t want to sell his house shoes,” said the Cardinal.

  “You stay out of this,” said Norwood.

  “You international thug. You’re just like Hitler and Tojo wrapped up into one.”

  Norwood tried Eugene once more. “Look, you can get another pair of these dudes easy for six bits at the Goodwill Store. I’m offering you two dollars. What about me? I don’t have any shoes. I lost some thirty-eight-dollar boots last night. They took ’em right off my feet. They didn’t give me anything.”

  “You better give Tojo what he wants, Eugene. He’ll terrorize you if you don’t. That’s the way he does business.”

  “Don’t call me Tojo any more.”

  “This is a free country, thug. You can call people anything you want to. Can’t you, Eugene?”

  Norwood rolled the two dollar bills into a cylinder and pushed it into Eugene’s shirt pocket. “I ought not to give you anything. Jumping up on people’s backs. They’ll put you in a home somewhere if you don’t watch out.”

  NORWOOD paid his fare and rode a commuter special in to New York. He sat in the smoking section in a green padded seat that faced crossways and took up both armrests with his elbows. He bought some coffee in a paper cup with handles, and a heavy cakelike doughnut that stuck in the throat. It had an unpleasant spicy taste. “You want the rest of this?” he said to the man sitting by him.

  “No, thanks.”

  “I didn’t put my hands on it.”

  “Thanks but no.”

  Norwood placed it in the chrome ashtray between them. The man glanced down at it. In a minute or two he did it again. “I didn’t see any other place to put it,” said Norwood. He picked it up and put it in his empty cup and held it. His hands were cold. Too much smoking? He flexed his fingers and made the joints pop. A bow-tied man across the aisle, not much himself but maybe some pretty girl’s father, was watching him. Norwood stared back. The man looked up at the light fixture on the ceiling to calculate its dimensions and efficiency. There were no girls on the train, no women at all, only these clean men. They bathed every day, every morning. He caught another one looking at him down the way. He was a mess, no doubt about it. The sole of one shoe was flopping and he had B.O. pretty bad. His red beard was beginning to bristle and there were patches of flour like dirty snow on his back where Eugene had been. One day Eugene would let somebody have it with that .32. Get a face full of hot powder himself, with that loose cylinder.

  He had some more coffee at a stand-up counter in Penn Station and the people there looked at him too, but not for long because they had to get back to their newspapers. He picked up his change and looked at it. “Hey wait a minute,” he called to the girl. She had black hair piled up high and dark tiger eyes. She came back and gave the counter a quick wipe with a blue sponge that had one cornflake riding on the stern. She looked at the dime and nickel in his hand. That was right. People watched furtively over their papers. This guy with the hat was going to start something.

  “What is it?” said the girl.

  “I guess you didn’t hear the radio this morning,” he said.

  “I don’t gitcha.”

  He pointed at the fifteen cents. “The weatherman said no change today.”

  “Oh fer Chrissakes.”

  Somebody on the other side of the plastic orange juice vat said, “What did he say?” and somebody else said, “I couldn’t hear it.” They all went back to their papers. Whatever it was, it was over.

  A friendly airman third class found Joe William’s number in the Manhattan directory and Norwood tried to give him a quarter but he wouldn’t take it. He brought his bag and guitar into the booth with him and dialed. The phone started to ring, then made an unsatisfactory noise and a recorded voice came through to say the number had been disconnected. He got his dime back and dialed the operator. After a short discussion she passed him on to a supervisor.

  “That number has been disconnected, sir,” said the supervisor.

  “Yeah, that othern told me that. Do you know if he’s gone home or what?”

  “We don’t have that information.”

  “I thought he might of left word with somebody in case somebody needed to get aholt of him.”

  “No sir, we don’t have that kind of information.”

  “I guess you can’t keep up with everybody, can you?”

  “No sir, we can’t.”

  “Uh-huh. Well. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He washed up in the men’s room but it didn’t help much. What he needed was a bath and a shave. His hair was stiff and in places it hurt when he mashed down on it in a certain way. This was no place to shave, worse than a barracks head. Traffic and flushing and people combing their hair behind you and not enough flat surfaces around the bowl to put your stuff on. The faucets had strong springs in them so you couldn’t let the water run. A man bumped him and said “Sorry” and Norwood quickly checked his billfold and made sure the hip pocket was buttoned. This was the kind of place pickpockets liked. Those boogers had quick hands. Be all in your clothes and you wouldn’t know it. He dried off under a hot air blower.

  Outside, a porter pointed him toward Times Square. As he made his way up Seventh Avenue a man with puffy eyes (dope fiend?) stopped him and tried to sell him a four-color ball-point pen for a dollar. Norwood brushed him off. What did they think, that he was somebody who would b
uy something like that on the street? No telling what they were thinking, the way he looked. That he would be amazed at a lot of things. Like Tarzan’s New York Adventure.

  He looked at the movie posters on both sides of Forty-second Street and had a glass of beer and some giant corrugated French fries. The windows were full of many good buys in transistor radios and field glasses. Did any one live upstairs over the movie theaters? He saw himself on television at Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, and looked at all the curios downstairs, believing most of them but not believing the one about Marshal W. M. Pitman of Wharton, Texas, shooting a bullet right into a crook’s gun in 1932. Still, there was the gun, and why would they make it up? Across the street he watched a man with a beanie at a sewing machine. The man was talking like Donald Duck and sewing names on other beanies. Stella and Fred and Ernie. His workmanship was good. How did he get that job? What did it pay? Being able to sew names and talk like Donald Duck. He walked up as far as Fifty-ninth Street, where things began to peter out, then came back. There was a man in a Mr. Peanut outfit in front of the Planters place but he was not giving out sample nuts, he was just walking back and forth. The Mr. Peanut casing looked hot. It looked thick enough to give protection against small arms fire.

  “Do they pay you by the hour or what?” Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.

  “Yeah, by the hour,” said a wary, muffled voice inside.

  “I bet that suit is heavy.”

  “It’s not all that heavy. I just started this morning.”

  “How much do you get a hour?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

  “Do you take the suit home with you?”

  “No, I put it on down here. At the shop.”

  “The one in Dallas gives out free nuts.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. They didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “He don’t give you many, just two or three cashews.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I work at the post office at night.”

  “Well, I’ll see you sometime, Mr. Peanut. You take it easy.”

  “Okay. You too.”

  A woman in the Times Square Information Center, about forty but with a smooth powdered neck he wouldn’t have minded biting, gave him a subway map and told him that the best way to get to the East Eleventh Street address was to take the BMT to Union Square, then change to the Fourteenth Street-Canarsie line going east and get off at First Avenue. It was impossible to remember. On his way to the subway entrance he stopped at a shoeshine parlor to ask again. Or it was not so much a parlor as a notch in the wall with room for only one chair and the shine man himself, who was small and dark and aproned.

  “Say—”

  “Beat it, fellow,” said the shine man, not looking up from his work. “I don’t have time to answer questions.”

  “I just wanted to know—”

  “You wanna know something, ask a cop. They get paid for it. I pay two hundred dollars a month for this rathole and at twenty cents a shine that means I got to shine two thousand individual shoes just to pay the rent.”

  Norwood forgot his own problem at once. “You’re not figuring your tips in on that?”

  “I don’t have time to talk, fellow. Beat it, okay? If I was on the city payroll it would be different. Everybody thinks I’m on the city payroll.”

  “You’re trying to make it sound like you have to shine more shoes than you really do. Why don’t you figure your tips in on it?”

  The shine man stood up and put one fist on his hip and did a Mediterranean fast burn. “You can’t figure it that way, Mr. Smart Guy. You gotta figure it on your base rate, which is twenty cents. A lotta smart guys think they know more about my business than I do.”

  The man in the chair put down his magazine. “Look, I’m in kind of a hurry,” he said.

  “Sure, you’re in a hurry,” said the shine man. “I’m in a hurry, everybody in the world is in a hurry except this smart guy that has time to go down the street telling everybody how to run their business. How can I work with a smart guy standing over my shoulder telling me how to run my business? The answer is—I can’t.”

  “Leave him alone, buddy,” said the man in the chair.

  “Go bother Mayor Wagner,” said the shine man. “He needs advice. Tell him how to run the city. He’s on the city payroll. Don’t bother me, bother somebody on the city payroll.”

  The subway was cleaner and more brightly lighted than Norwood had expected, and it moved faster. He jostled his way forward to the front car and looked through the glass with his hands cupped around his face. He was disappointed to find the tunnel so roomy. Only a very fat man could be trapped in it with a train coming. The air smelled of electricity and dirt.

  In one of the pedestrian tunnels at the Union Square stop a man was stretched out on the concrete having a fit and forcing people to step around him in the narrow passageway. Norwood watched him as he gave a few terminal jerks and a long sigh. He knew he should look to see if the man had swallowed his tongue, the way they used to have to do with that Eubanks boy in the fifth grade, but he didn’t want to put his finger in the man’s mouth unless he had to. It was all right for doctors. They didn’t care where they put their hands. He lifted the man by the armpits and propped him against the wall. The man rolled his eyes. His legs were rubbery and he couldn’t stand alone.

  “You want some water?” said Norwood.

  “Water? Yeah.”

  “Well . . . I don’t have any. How about a cigarette?”

  “You can’t smoke down here.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  A woman with some packages stopped and inquired and Norwood told her to go see if she could find somebody. She said she would tell a transit policeman. Norwood waited. Without the blockage people rushed along now in a steady stream. No policeman came. A foot brushed the guitar and made it ring. The man closed his eyes and took a nap standing there. No policeman. Norwood reached out into the stream and grabbed a man’s arm, a dapper man in a neat metallic suit.

  “Hold this fellow up a minute.”

  The man jumped and did as he was told. Then he said, “Hey, what is this, you?”

  Norwood was picking up his gear. “Somebody’s coming to get him. They’re on the way.”

  “Where are you going? What do you think you’re doing? You can’t detain me like this. I’m an officer of the court. I’ve got to get downtown.”

  “We all got to catch trains. I can’t be down here helping folks out all day myself. I don’t even live here.”

  “I won’t be put in a false position, you. This is a false position.”

  “I got to go.”

  Norwood found the Canarsie line with no trouble but on the train he let his mind wander and the next thing he knew he was under the river, and then in Brooklyn. Arnold. Was he on the phone to Grady? He crossed over the platform and doubled back on another train and this time he stood by the doors all the way. Daylight again. First Avenue and Fourteenth. Tenements and garbage cans. This was where people lived in New York. Leo Gorcey and his pals working up a plan in the candy store. Huntz Hall messing up everything. Satch.

  It was a short walk to the address on Eleventh Street. On the sidewalk in front of the place some shirtless Puerto Rican boys were roasting marshmallows over a smoldering mattress.

  Norwood stopped and looked at the tenement number and rested the guitar on his foot. “You boys having a big time?”

  “It’s a campfire,” said one. He was wearing huge comic sunglasses and had his head tilted back to keep them on. He offered Norwood a blackened marshmallow from the end of a straightened-out coat hanger.

  “I believe I’d rather have one right out of the sack. They ain’t gonna taste like anything cooked over hair.” He reached for the cellophane package but another boy grabbed it off the stoop. Norwood let it pass. “You boys need to get you so
me wood. You need a wood far for these dudes.”

  “We don’t have any wood.”

  “Go down at the store and get you a apple box. They’ll let you have one. Pine would be better than what you got here.”

  The boy who grabbed the marshmallows pointed at the guitar. “Can you play that?”

  “Yeah and I’m liable to get it out just any minute and sing a song. Do all know a old boy name Joe William Reese?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “I know this is where he lives. I got it on a piece of paper.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “When will you play that guitar?” said the grabber.

  “It’s hard to say. I might not play it all now.”

  “Marie has a guitar. She knows a hundred songs.”

  “She don’t know that many.”

  “She does too.”

  “I don’t know but one myself. It’s about a squirrel. He lived out in the woods and every time he would get something good his friends would be hungry and they would come around and want some. They’d say, ‘Hey, squirrel, let me have a bite of that Clark bar.’ And the squirrel, he would say, real mean, ‘Naw! I’m on eat it all myself! It’s good too!’ And pretty soon out there in the woods they were all calling him the stingy squirrel and he didn’t have any more friends to play with.”

  The boys looked at Norwood.

  “Well, it’s more what you would call a story than a song,” he said. “There’s a good lesson in it.”

  He examined a row of mailboxes in the foyer and Joe William’s name was there all right, although it had been penciled over # 2. The hall was dark and there were dust balls that the broom had missed. They rolled along like miniature tumbleweeds. Norwood struck a match and found # 2 the first shot. He stood outside the door for a moment. There was movement inside. He unzipped the guitar and without tuning up he hit one loud nylon chord and sang:There’ll be smoke on the water