Norwood Page 8

  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.

  They talked. He edged closer to her through a series of leg crossings and body adjustments. Soon he had his arm over her shoulder. No resistance. He let it slide down a little and began squeezing the soft flesh of her upper arm. It was wonderful. The way he was doing it, with just a thumb and finger, giving a thick pinch here and there, was like a witch testing a captured child for plumpness. Rita Lee couldn’t decide whether she liked it or not. She had been grabbed and wrenched about in many different ways but this was a new one. She stiffened.

  “I was afraid of this,” she said. “I was afraid the minute I sat down here you would think I was looking for love on a bus.”

  Norwood didn’t stop, nor did he answer, not liking to have a
ttention called to what he was doing when he was at this kind of thing. He nuzzled her. “I mean it now,” she said, but not with any firmness, and he cleared his throat and kissed her and she relaxed, Wayne the Marine out of mind. He went back to the arm business, still not saying anything or acknowledging in any way that anything was going on.

  After a time she said, “Norwood?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “What is your all-time Kitty Wells favorite?”

  “I’d have to think about it.”

  “Mine is ‘Makin’ Believe.’”

  “Yeah, that’s mine too.”

  “Listen.”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to hear you sing sometime.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why don’t you sing something now? I’d like to hear something now.”

  “Not on the bus.”

  “You could do it soft.”

  “Naw, not on the bus.”

  “What is your singing style like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. Who do you sing like?”

  “Have you ever heard Lefty Frizzell sing ‘I Love You a Thousand Ways’?”

  “No, I never even heard of Lefty Frizzell.”

  “I don’t guess I can explain it then.”

  “You got a scar back here on your neck. It looks awful. There’s not any hair growing on it.”

  “I fell off a water truck in Korea.”

  “Did you do any fighting over there?”

  “I got in on the tail end of it.”

  “Did you kill anybody?”

  “Just two that I know of.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I shot ’em.”

  “I mean but how?”

  “Well, with a light machine gun. They were out there in front of the barb war and one of ’em hit a trip flare. It was right in front of my bunker and they just froze. My gun was already laid on ’em, except I had to traverse a little and I cranked off about thirty rounds and dropped’em right there.”

  “Did they scream?”

  “If they did I didn’t hear ’em. A bunch of mortars come in and when that let up me and a old boy from South Carolina name Tims went out there and throwed a plank acrost the war and brought their bodies back.”

  “I bet you got a medal.”

  “For that? Naw. The skipper didn’t even like it much. He wanted a prisoner. He thought I should of run out there with my .45 and said ‘You two gooks are under arrest.’ ”

  “You should of got a medal.”

  “You don’t get medals for things like that. Unless you’re a officer. They give ’em to each other.”

  “If I had killed anybody I don’t think I could sleep at night.”

  “That’s what we was there for.”

  “I know that but still.”

  “It didn’t bother me none. It wasn’t no more than shooting squirrels. Naw, it wasn’t as much because squirrels are not trying to kill you. With big one-twenty mortars.”

  “I never even seen anybody dead close up and I don’t want to either.”

  “Them two needed killing anyway. If they had dropped down flat when that flare went off I couldn’t of depressed my gun down far enough to hit ’em.”

  “Come on now, hon, and sit up a minute. I’m about to fall off this seat.”

  Norwood sat up and moved over to his side and lit a cigarette. Rita Lee didn’t exactly want this, a total disengagement, and she snuggled up against him and put his arm, dead weight, across her shoulders.

  “You’re a lot heftier than Wayne is,” she said. “He’s tall and stringy. His best friend in the Marines is a nigger. What it is, he likes nigger music and nigger jokes. He can talk like one pretty good. After he got his car him and Otis Webb robbed every Coke machine in the county. People commenced rolling ’em inside at night. Otis had to go to reform school because he was sixteen and a nigger and the judge told Wayne he could either go to the pen or the Marines. Wayne took me out to eat at Otis’s house one time and their floor was as clean as any shirt you got in your drawer. You’re not even listening to me.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Let me have a drag off that.”

  “This Wayne don’t sound like much to me.”

  “Well, he’s sorry in a lot of ways, I never said he wasn’t, but he’s got a kind heart. I’ll say this, the world would be a better place to live and work in if everybody was as nice to niggers as Wayne.”

  “I guess you got your mind set on marrying him.”

  “I don’t know if I do or not and that’s the gospel truth. I don’t know if I’m coming or going, my heart is so mixed up.”

  “What do you aim to do if he don’t want to get married?”

  “Well, I thought some about going and stay with my sister in Augusta and get in beautician school. She teaches at Mr. Lonnie’s School of Hair Design. But she’s so funny about people staying with her. She gets to where she sulls up and won’t talk and slams doors. It’s pure d. meanness is what is it. She needs somebody to just slap the snot out of her.”

  “You could go with me.”

  “Go with you and do what?”

  “Just go with me. Go to Shreveport with me.”

  “You mean get married?”

  “You don’t have to get married to go to Shreveport with somebody.”

  “Boy, that’s a good one.”

  “Well, you don’t.”

  “Rita Lee Chipman does, hon.”

  “Maybe we’ll get married then. When we get to Shreveport.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “Naw I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Naw I’m not. Really.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not, Norwood. I don’t even know you. You meet somebody on a bus and ask them to marry you right off. You must think I’m just a plaything of love.”

  “Naw I don’t.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you well enough.”

  “What do you like about me?”

  “Well. A lot of things. I like the way you look.”

  “I’ll tell you this, I don’t like to have tricks played on me. I read a true story the other day about a girl that fell in love with a good looking novelties salesman and he took her to Lewisville, Kentucky, and then run off and left her there at a motel that had a little swimming pool out front. She didn’t know a soul in Lewisville, Kentucky. She didn’t hardly have a change of clothes. She was just walking around the streets there thinking every minute somebody was gonna jump out and get her.”

  “Did she go in that pool any?”

  “Some woman from the courthouse come and got her and put her in a home. That’s where she wrote the story from, it said.”

  “Well. I told you what I would do.”

  “I’d have to tell Wayne.”

  “You could write him a card.”

  “That wouldn’t be right. Either way I’ll have to go down there and talk to him.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “You better just do what you want to do.”

  “I’ll go down there with you then.”

  “I was wondering if you would say that.”

  “Right here is where your novelties salesman would back out.”

  “Norwood, I think I’m falling in love with you. If you were sick I would look after you and bathe you.”

  “Yeah, but don’t talk so loud.”

  “I wonder if you really love me. Do you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think you can say it?”

  “I will sometime. Not on the bus.”

  “You don’t mind saying it in a song, why can’t you say it talking?”

  “A song is different. You’re just singing a song there.”

  “It’s not hard for people who really mean it to say it.”

  “It is if so
mebody’s trying to make you say it. When somebody gets your arm around behind you and wants to make you say ‘calf rope,’ well, you don’t want to say it then.”

  They reached Jacksonville in the very early morning. The sun was not hot yet but it was bright and painful to their grainy eyes. A dozen or so Marines in limp khaki and with ruined shoeshines were hanging about the station waiting for the last liberty bus back. Fatigue and unhappiness were in their faces, as of young men whose shorts are bunching up. A city cop and an MP sat together in a squad car outside, slumped down in the seat, not talking, and too bored or tired even to go to the trouble of looking mean. Inside the station on a bench some mail-order baby chicks were cheeping away in a perforated box. Bargain chicks. No guarantee of sex, breed or color. Did anybody ever get fifty little roosters? Norwood and Rita Lee passed on through to the café and had an unpleasant breakfast.

  Rita Lee was out of sorts. Her cheeks were red from all the nuzzling and she had rubbed them down with some powerful Noxzema. Norwood commented on the smell of that popular medicated cream.

  “Maybe if you’d ever shave sometime I wouldn’t have to use it,” she said.

  “I don’t have all that stiff a beard.”

  “What happened to my face then?”

  “I don’t know. I can use a regular thin Gillette five times.”

  The waitress was at the end of the counter filling sugar dispensers with a scoop. “Hey Red,” she called out, “is yall’s sugar thing full?”

  “Yeah, it’s all right,” said Norwood. “We already too sweet as it is anyway.” This sally brought a chuckle from the waitress.

  “I guess you’d like to take her to Shreveport with you,” said Rita Lee.

  “She don’t have enough meat on her bones,” he said.