Nora Jane (5 page)

“Not here,” he would answer curtly, “haven’t seen him.” And Jody would hang up without offering to take a message. If a woman
wanted a man at Jody’s she had to come look for him in person.

There was an air of anticipation around Jody’s this Saturday morning. All eight of the stools were filled. The excitement
was due to the poll.

Outside of Jody’s, seated at a small card table underneath a green-and-white-striped awning, Wesley Labouisse was proceeding
with the poll in a businesslike manner. Every male passerby was interviewed in turn and his ballot folded into quarters and
deposited in the Mason jar with a pink ribbon from an old Valentine’s box wrapped loosely around it.

“Just mark it yes or no. Whatever advice you would give your closest friend if he came to you and told you he was thinking
of getting married.” Wesley was talking to a fourteen-year-old boy straddling a ten-speed bike.

“Take all the time you need to make up your mind. Think about your mother and father. Think about what it’s like to have a
woman tell you when to come home every night and when to get up in the morning and when to take a bath and when to talk and
when to shut up. Think about what it’s like to give your money to a woman from now till the day you die. Then just write down
your honest feelings about whether a perfectly happy man ought to go out and get himself married.”

Wesley was in a good mood. He had thought up the poll himself and had side bets laid all the way from The New Orleans Country
Club to the Plaquemines Parish sheriff’s office.

There was a big sign tacked up over the card table declaring THIS POLL IS BEING CONDUCTED WITHOUT REGARD TO SEX OR PREVIOUS CONDITION OF SERVITUDE. Wesley had made the sign himself and thought it was hilarious. He was well known in New Orleans society as the author of
Boston Club Mardi Gras skits.

The leading man in the drama of the poll, Prescott Hamilton IV, was leaning into Jody’s pinball machine with the dedication
of a ballet dancer winding up The Firebird. He was twelve games ahead and his brand-new, navy blue wedding suit hung in its
plastic see-through wrapper on the edge of the machine swaying in rhythm as Prescott nudged the laws of pinball machines gently
in his favor. He was a lucky gambler and an ace pinball-machine player. He was a general favorite at Jody’s, where the less
aristocratic customers loved him for his gentle ways and his notoriously hollow leg.

Prescott wasn’t pretending to be more interested in the outcome of the pinball-machine game than in the outcome of the poll
that was deciding his matrimonial future. He was genuinely more interested in the pinball machine. Prescott had great powers
of concentration and was a man who lived in the present.

Prescott didn’t really care whether he married Emily Anne Hughes or not. He and Emily Anne had been getting along fine for
years without getting married, and he didn’t see what difference his moving into Emily Anne’s house at this late date was
going to make in the history of the world.

Besides he wasn’t certain how his Labradors would adjust to her backyard. Emily Anne’s house was nice, but the yard was full
of little fences and lacked a shade tree.

Nonetheless, Prescott was a man of his word, and if the poll came out in favor of marriage they would be married as soon as
he could change into his suit and find an Episcopal minister, unless Emily Anne would be reasonable and settle for the judge.

Prescott was forty-eight years old. The wild blood of his pioneer ancestors had slowed down in Prescott. Even his smile took
a long time to develop, feeling out the terrain, then opening up like a child’s.

“Crime wave, crime wave, that’s all I hear around this place anymore,” the judge muttered, tapping his cigar on the edge of
the bar and staring straight at the rack of potato chips. “Let’s talk about something else for a change.”

“Judge, you ought to get Jody to take you back to the ladies’ room and show you the job Claiborne did of patching the window
so kids on the street can’t see into the ladies’,” one of the regulars said. Two or three guys laughed, holding their stomachs.

“Claiborne owed Jody sixty bucks on his tab and the window was broken out in the ladies’ room so Jody’s old lady talked him
into letting Claiborne fix the window to pay back part of the money he owes. After all, Claiborne is supposed to be a carpenter.”
Everyone started laughing again.

“Well, Claiborne showed up about six sheets in the wind last Wednesday while Jody was out jogging in the park and he went
to work. You wouldn’t believe what he did. He boarded up the window. He didn’t feel like going out for a windowpane, so he
just boarded up the window with scrap lumber.”

“I’ll have to see that as soon as it calms down around here,” the judge said, and he turned to watch Prescott, who was staring
passionately into the lighted TILT sign on the pinball machine.

“What’s wrong, Prescott,” he said, “you losing your touch?”

“Could be, Judge,” Prescott answered, slipping another quarter into the slot.

The late afternoon sun shone in the windows of the bare apartment. Nora Jane had dumped most of her possessions into a container
for The Volunteers of America. She had even burned Sandy’s letters. If she was caught there was no sense in involving him.

If she was caught what could they do to her, a young girl, a first offender, the daughter of a hero? The sisters would come
to her rescue. Nora Jane had carefully been attending early morning mass for several weeks.

She trembled with excitement and glanced at her watch. She shook her head and walked over to the mirror on the dresser. Nora
Jane couldn’t decide if she was frightened or not. She looked deep into her eyes in the mirror trying to read the secrets
of her mind, but Nora Jane was too much in love to even know her own secrets. She was inside a mystery deeper than the mass.

She inspected the reddish-blond wig with its cascades of silky Dynel falling around her shoulders and blinked her black eyelashes.
To the wig and eyelashes she added blue eye shadow, peach rouge, and beige lipstick. Nora Jane looked awful.

“You look like a piece of shit,” she said to her reflection, adding another layer of lipstick. “Anyway, it’s time to go.”

On weekends six o’clock was the slow hour at Jody’s, when most of the customers went home to change for the evening.

Nora Jane walked down the two flights of stairs and out onto the sidewalk carrying the brown leather bag. Inside was her costume
change and a bus ticket to San Francisco zippered into a side compartment. The gun was stuffed into one of the Red Cross shoes
she had bought to wear with the short brown nun’s habit she had stolen from Dominican College. She hoped the short veil wasn’t
getting wrinkled. Nora Jane was prissy about her appearance.

As she walked along in the August evening she dreamed of Sandy sitting on her bed playing his harmonica while she pretended
to sleep. In the dream he was playing an old Bob Dylan love song, the sort of thing she liked to listen to before he upgraded
her taste in music.

Earlier that afternoon Nora Jane had rolled a pair of shorts, an old shirt, and some sandals into a neat bundle and hidden
it in the low-hanging branches of the oak tree where Sandy had planted her money.

A scrawny-looking black kid was dozing in the roots of the tree. He promised to keep an eye on her things.

“If I don’t come back by tomorrow afternoon you can have this stuff,” she told him. “The sandals were handmade in Brazil.”

“Thanks,” the black kid said. “I’ll watch it for you till then. You running away from home or what?”

“I’m going to rob a bank,” she confided.

The black kid giggled and shot her the old peace sign.

Wesley walked into the bar where Prescott, Jody, and the judge were all alone watching the evening news on television.

“Aren’t you getting tired of that goddamn poll,” Prescott said to him. “Emily Anne won’t even answer her phone. A joke’s a
joke, Wesley. I better put on my suit and get on over there.”

“Not yet,” Wesley said. “The sun isn’t all the way down yet. Wait till we open the jar. You promised.” Prescott was drunk,
but Wesley was drunker. Not that either of them ever showed their whiskey.

“I promised I wouldn’t get married unless you found one boy or man all day who thought it was an unqualified good idea to
get married. I didn’t ever say I was interested in waiting around for the outcome of a vote. Come on and open up that jar
before Emily Anne gets any madder.”

“What makes you think there is a single ballot in favor of you getting married?” Wesley asked.

“I don’t know if there is or there isn’t,” Prescott answered. “So go on and let the judge open that goddamn jar.”

“Look at him, Wesley,” Jody said delightedly. “He ain’t even signed the papers yet and he’s already acting like a married
man. Already worried about getting home in time for dinner. If Miss Emily Anne Hughes wakes up in the morning wearing a ring
from Prescott, I say she takes the cake. I say she’s gone and caught a whale on a ten-pound test line.”

“Open the jar,” Prescott demanded, while the others howled with laughter.

Nora Jane stepped into the bar, closed the door behind her, and turned the lock. She kept the pistol pointed at the four men
who were clustered around the cash register.

“Please be quiet and put your hands over your heads before I kill one of you,” she said politely, waving the gun with one
hand and reaching behind herself with the other to draw the window shade that said CLOSED in red letters.

Prescott and the judge raised their hands first, then Wesley.

“Do as you are told,” the judge said to Jody in his deep voice. “Jody, do what that woman tells you to do and do it this instant.”
Jody added his hands to the six already pointing at the ceiling fan.

“Get in there,” Nora Jane directed, indicating the ladies’ room at the end of the bar. “Please hurry before you make me angry.
I ran away from DePaul’s Hospital yesterday afternoon and I haven’t had my medication and I become angry very easily.”

The judge held the door open, and the four men crowded into the small bathroom.

“Face the window,” Nora Jane ordered, indicating Claiborne’s famous repair job. The astonished men obeyed silently as she
closed the bathroom door and turned the skeleton key in its lock and dropped it on the floor under the bar.

“Please be very quiet so I won’t get worried and need to shoot through the door,” she said. “Be awfully quiet. I am an alcoholic
and I need some of this whiskey. I need some whiskey in the worst way.”

Nora Jane changed into the nun’s habit, wiping the makeup off her face with a bar rag and stuffing the old clothes into the
bag. Next she opened the cash register, removed all the bills without counting them, and dropped them into the bag. On second
thought she added the pile of IOUs and walked back to the door of the ladies’ room.

“Please be a little quieter,” she said in a husky voice. “I’m getting very nervous.”

“Don’t worry, Miss. We are cooperating to the fullest extent,” the judge’s bench voice answered.

“That’s nice,” Nora Jane said. “That’s very nice.”

She pinned the little veil to her hair, picked up the bag, and walked out the door. She looked all around, but there was no
one on the street but a couple of kids riding tricycles.

As she passed the card table she stopped, marked a ballot, folded it neatly, and dropped it into the Mason jar.

Then, like a woman in a dream, she walked on down the street, the rays of the setting sun making her a path all the way to
the bus stop at the corner of Annunciation and Nashville Avenue.

Making her a path all the way to mountains and valleys and fields, to rivers and streams and oceans. To a boy who was like
no other. To the source of all water.

S
HE HAD WRITTEN
to him, since neither of them had a phone.

I’ll be there Sunday morning at four. It’s called the Night Owl flight in case you forget the number. The number’s 349. If
you can’t come get me I’ll get a taxi and come on over. I saw Johnny Vidocovitch last night. He’s got a new bass player. He
told Ron he could afford to get married now that he’d found his bass player. Doesn’t that sound just like him. I want to go
to that chocolate place in San Francisco the minute I get there. And lie down with you in the dark for a million years. Or
in the daylight. I love you. Nora Jane

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the gate. Then he wasn’t in the terminal. Then he wasn’t at the baggage carousel. Nora Jane
stood by the carousel taking her hat on and off, watching a boy in cowboy boots kiss his girlfriend in front of everyone at
the airport. He would run his hands down her flowered skirt, then kiss her again.

Finally the bags came. Nora Jane got her flat shoes out of her backpack and went on out to find a taxi. It’s because I was
too cheap to get a phone, she told herself. I knew I should have had a phone.

She found a taxi and was driven off into the hazy early morning light of San Jose. The five hundred and forty dollars she
got from the robbery was rolled up in her bag. The hundred and twenty she saved from her job was in her bra. She had been
awake all night. And something was wrong. Something had gone wrong.

“You been out here before?” the driver said.

“It’s the first time I’ve been farther west than Alexandria,” she said. “I’ve hardly ever been anywhere.”

“How old are you?” he said. He was in a good mood. He had just gotten a $100 tip from a drunk movie star. Besides, the little
black-haired girl in the backseat had the kind of face you can’t help being nice to.

“I’ll be twenty this month,” she said. “I’m a Moonchild. They used to call it Cancer but they changed. Do you believe in that
stuff?”

“I don’t know,” the driver said. “Some days I believe in anything. Look over there. Sun’s coming up behind the mountains.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “I forgot there would be mountains.”