Norwood (14 page)

“Is this KWOT?”

“This is Norwood Pratt over in the Memphis bus station.”

“Who are you?”

“I want to talk to Joe William Reese.”

“He's outside skinning catfish.”

“Can you get him to the phone?”

“I don't know.” She left.

Norwood waited. The operator asked for another quarter. Then another. His ear reddened and got hot and stuck to his head. He shifted the phone to the other side.

Presently, a voice. “Hello, hello, anybody there?”

“Joe William Reese?”

“Yes, speaking.”

“This is First Sergeant Brown at Headquarters, Marine Corps. We've been looking over our books up here and it looks like we owe you some money.”

“Yeah?” How much?”

“Our books say two thousand and sixty dollars.”

“All right, who is this?”

“I told the Commandant you'd probably want to give it to the Navy Relief since you never did give any on payday.”

“
Norwood.
Where in the hell are you?”

“I'm over here at Memphis in the bus station.”

“What are you doing in Memphis?”

“Nothing. Just passing through. I thought I'd stop by and see you. I been waiting on this phone all day. Some old woman went to get you.”

“Oh. Grandmother. She's not supposed to answer the phone. You're just in time. We're having a family fish fry this evening. Do you like frog legs?”

“Not much, naw.”

“Well, there's plenty of catfish. You should have been with us last night. We caught a mess of 'em. Two trot lines.”

“Did the turtles get your bait?”

“No, they weren't too active last night. I think they were all attending a meeting somewhere. Look, it'll take me about forty-five minutes to get there. You be over in front of the Peabody Hotel. That's right across from where you are.”

“Okay. I got a—”

“We might bust a watermelon later, you can't tell. Spit seeds on the girls and make 'em cry.”

“Wait a minute. Hold on a minute. I got a couple of people with me. Is it okay if they come?”

“I don't see why not.”

“One of 'em is a girl.”

“That's fine. Anybody I know?”

“Naw, it's just a girl. I met her a couple of days ago. We're thinking about getting married when we get home.”

“Boy, that was fast work. What did you do, pick her up on a bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Well sure, bring her on.”

“Is there some special place you're supposed to get a wife?”

“No, I guess they're just wherever you find 'em. Buses, drugstores, VFW huts. Don't be so touchy.”

“She's good looking. You never seen me with a girl that looked this good before.”

“She sounds like a sweetheart, Norwood. Maybe we can get something in the paper about it:
Mr. Pratt Reveals Plans.
”

“This othern is a midget.”

“I didn't get that.”

“I say this othern with me, he's a midget.”

“I don't follow. You mean a short guy?”

“Yeah, well he's short all right but he's not
just
short, he's a midget. He used to be in a circus. You know, a midget. His folks sold him.”

“But not to you?”

“Naw,
hell,
Joe William. They sold him when he was a boy. He's about forty-eight years old.”

“Okay. Whatever you say. Is there anybody else? Any Japanese exchange students?”

“Naw, that's all. Have you got my money?”

“Yes, I have, I've got it. I'm working. I've been meaning to send it to you. I'm checking cotton acreage.”

“That's that government job?”

“Yeah.”

“They pay straight time, don't they?”

“No, it's by the hour.”

“How much?”

“Two dollars. Sixteen bucks a day, no overtime.”

“That's not bad.”

“Yeah, it's okay. You furnish your own car.”

“You get mileage?”

“No.”

“Do you have to have a education?”

“No, not really. You have to carry a stick. Killer dogs lope out from under houses when you drive up.”

“I got a chicken over here too. I forgot about her. Have you got some place to put her over there?”

“Look, maybe I better charter a bus for your group.”

“Don't get smart about it. This ain't a regular chicken. I wouldn't be carrying just a plain chicken around.”

“No, I'm sure there's a good reason why you're traveling with a chicken. But I can't think what it is.”

“Well, it's too long to explain over the phone. She was in a box in North Carolina answering questions and it was hot in there.”

“I see.”

“How's the girl?”

“She's fine. I think she's decided I'm about as good as she's going to do.”

Mr. Reese cooked the fish in two iron skillets on a barbecue furnace, which was under a big black walnut tree. The walnuts were scattered underfoot and looked like rotten baseballs. Mr. Reese was a rangy, worried man in khakis. He knew his business with the meal sack and the grease and the fish, never turning them until it was just the right time. He talked to Edmund at length about a staging area he had passed through in Northern Ireland in 1944 and said he had always admired the English for their bulldog qualities.

The front yard was twenty acres or so of Johnson grass with some polled Herefords grazing on it, two of them standing belly deep in a brown, warm-looking pond, for what comfort was in it. Mr. Reese said Johnson grass had a much higher protein value than people thought and that it played an important role in his feeding program. He was uneasy and defensive, and seemed to be afraid that Edmund was secretly amused at his farming methods. By way of changing the subject he said, “I've got eighty paper-shell pecan trees I'd like to show you before dark.”

“I'd very much like to see them,” said Edmund.

“Of course they're not all that much to look at. They're just trees.”

Edmund had bathed and changed and was now wearing white linen slacks and a navy blue blazer, which he kept thumping lint from.

The house was a sprawling 1928 story-and-a-half nature's-bounty farmhouse, done over with Johns-Manville asbestos shingles (“Not One Has Ever Burned.”). The front porch was long and wrapped halfway around one side of the house and there were two swings on it. The rich girl Kay sat in one and made room for Norwood but he said he didn't like to sit in a swing and eat. He had never had any meals in a swing but it was something to say. He sat doubled up in a deck chair, hunched forward and holding the paper plate on the floor between his shoes. He cleaned his bones like a cat and made a neat pile of them. He didn't want this girl to think he made a mess when he ate, whatever else she might think. They watched as Joe William made a howling, dusty departure in her Thunderbird.

“He's ruining my tires,” she said.

“It ain't helping your bad universal joint none either,” said Norwood.

“What's that?”

“It's a thing on the end of the drive shaft. Yours is shot. Can't you hear that clicking? They don't grease them U-joints like they ought to and them little needle bearings just freeze up in there.”

“I better get it fixed.”

“You'll have to take that whole shaft out. You know where that brace is right there in the middle that holds that carrier bearing study?”

“No, I don't.”

“Well, there's two bolts under there that hold that brace to the frame and if you're not careful you'll twist 'em off trying to get 'em out. And right there's where you got trouble.”

“In that case I think I'll have someone else do it. I didn't know you were a mechanic.”

“Well, I'm just a shade tree mechanic. I can do things like that. I'd be too slow to make a living at it.”

“Have a Fig Newton.”

“I don't believe I will, thanks. This fish was aplenty. I never was much to eat a cake.”

“Joe William owes you some money, doesn't he?”

“Well, he did. He paid me.”

“How much was it?”

“Seventy dollars.”

“I hope you won't lend him any more.”

“You don't have to worry none about that.”

“I keep thinking he'll grow up or whatever he needs to do.”

“Are you gonna marry him or what?”

“How did that come up?”

“He's a pretty good old boy when you get right down to it.”

“I'm not so sure of that.”

“A lot of girls would be proud to get him. He had a really good-looking one out in California. She was crazy about him. She had a car too and she'd always fix me up with somebody and we'd go up to the Compton Barn Dance. We had some good times.”

“Yeah, that divorcee with the name. I've seen her picture. She has fat arms. Boots or Tuffy or something.”

“Teeny.”

“I can just see those two together. The blond bombshell and him with his comic patter.”

“She looked pretty good to me.”

Mrs. Whichcoat filled Rita Lee in on the judge and told her all about the Butterfields. She told about the one who ran up an eleven-hundred-dollar candy bill in Memphis and forced the family to sell a slave to pay it, and about the one who drained the swamps and how he agitated unsuccessfully for a public statue of himself in the square, like the one of Popeye in the Texas spinach capital.

“They all pulled out and went down to Louisiana later, and just made a world of money doing something,” she said. “I forget now what it was. They knew how to make money, you have to give them that. How do you like that fish?”

“Oh, it's so good,” said Rita Lee.

“I bet you never had any that good where you're from.”

“No ma'am, I sure didn't.”

“It's not as good as some we've had. Is this your first trip to Arkansas, Wilma Jean?”

“Yes ma'am, it is,” said Rita Lee. “Except to Virginia it's my first real long trip anywhere. I been in seven states now.”

“Dick Powell is from Arkansas.”

“He is? I didn't know that. Dick Powell.”

“You can
see
seven states from Rock City,” said Mr. Reese. “At least that's what all those bumper signs say. You couldn't prove it by me.”

Mrs. Whichcoat turned on Edmund. “Did you ever run across a Dr. Butterfield in Wales?”

“No, but then I've never been in Wales, madam. Unless you count Monmouthshire. Curly hated Wales.”

“He was a leading practitioner in some well-known city there,” she said. “I can't remember which one. Cousin Mattie corresponded with him for quite a long time. Lord, he may be dead now. That was about 1912. The preachers nearly drove us all crazy then talking about the tariff. You don't hear anything about that any more. They're all on integration now.”

Mr. Reese wiped his hands on his apron and searched the skies. He said he would be surprised if they didn't get a shower sometime in the night. “That low started moving in here about four-thirty.”

He knew this because he had a thermometer-barometer on the front porch by the door. It was a big tin affair meant to hang on a storefront. There was an orange rooster on it, smiling, so far as a rooster can be made to smile, and crowing about Marvel cigarettes. The Snopesian tackiness of the thing was painful to Mrs. Reese. Mr. Reese took frequent readings and thought about them.

Mrs. Reese did not come outside until the sun was behind the trees because of her skin. She ate some coleslaw and went about being hospitable in her distant way. There were dark pouches under her eyes which an indoor existence and an uncommon amount of sleep did not help much. Things had not worked out well for her. The young planter she thought she was marrying turned out to be a farmer. Her mother got on her nerves. Instead of the gentle Lew Ayres doctor son she had counted on, the Lord had given her a poolroom clown. She claimed descent from the usurper Cromwell and she read a long paper once on her connections at a gathering of Confederate Daughters, all but emptying the ballroom of the Albert Pike Hotel in Little Rock. This was no small feat considering the tolerance level of a group who had sat unprotesting through two days of odes and diaries and recipes for the favorite dishes of General Pat Cleburne. She often managed to leave the impression that she was in Arkansas through some mistake and it was her belief, perhaps true, that only common people had piles.

Edmund and Joe William had to eat the frog legs. No one else would touch them, tasty morsels, although there was a lot of talk about how they were “considered a delicacy” and about how much you would pay for them in a good restaurant. Mrs. Whichcoat sacked up all the fishbones for burning, to keep them from the dogs, and gathered what was left of the corn-bread balls for her laying hens.

Mrs. Reese said, “Do you have any new hens, Mama?”

Mrs. Whichcoat did not answer at once. For some time now people had been closing in on her. She knew how quickly one of these casual openings could land her in a jam. Had she left the gas on again? Was this a new attack on her open range poultry policy? She considered several incriminating possibilities. “No, just the same old ones,” she said.

“It's very strange,” said Mrs. Reese. “I was looking out the bathroom window a while ago and I thought I saw a gray one out there with a hat on.”

“That one belongs to Norwood,” said Joe William. “It's a wonder chicken he brought in from North Carolina.”