“What’s wrong with you now?”
“I want some coffee,” said Miss Phillips. “I don’t like it back there in that car with nobody driving it.”
At an all-night diner on the edge of town they sat on stools and had coffee and cold sugary fried pies. Miss Phillips was morose. She had knots on her head fore and aft, and her legs were sticky with dried peach juice. The green party dress looked awful. Norwood snapped at the counter girl for putting cream in his coffee. She said she didn’t know where he was from but if you wanted it black you had to say so. He told her he was from a place where they let you put your own cream in your coffee. From little syrup pitchers with spring lids.
Miss Phillips, wistfully eating her fried pie, was not listening to this byplay. “Sammy would get me a job right off,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want Grady to know where I was. I guess you would tell him.”
“I wouldn’t tell him what time it was,” said Norwood. “After the way he done me.”
“He’s a disbarred lawyer and he knows a thousand ways to get you in trouble. I’d be afraid you would tell him where I went.”
“Naw, I said wouldn’t. I wisht you would go on. It would be a load off my mind.”
“I’m sorry I talked so ugly to you, Red. Why don’t you let me have one of those cars?”
Norwood put the keys on the counter. “I don’t want anything more to do with you or them cars. Take both of’em, Laverne, and go on. You can give one to Sammy. Tell him hello for me.”
“I can’t drive but one. You’ll have to unhook ’em.”
It was a job getting the reflex tow bar off. All he had was a pair of pliers. Somebody with big shoulders and a four-way lug wrench had jammed those nuts down to stay. It was no use, not with pliers. He kicked it and beat it with a rock. Finally he attacked it with a jack handle and chanted “This time . . . this time . . . this time . . .” until it broke loose. Miss Phillips had no goodbye for Norwood. She took the Oldsmobile without a word or a wave and roared off into the Midwestern night flinging driveway gravel. The tow bar, its ingenious patented action now so much junk, was dragging along behind, bouncing on the highway and kicking up sparks.
Norwood drove the Pontiac out past the last lights of town and turned off on a dirt road. He turned off that road onto a two-rut road and then into what looked like a blackberry patch. He gunned it through the thicket and over arm-size saplings, giving the Indiana forest folk a scare, until it hit some bigger trees and stopped. He forced his door open against the bushes and got out and looked around. This was not such a smart idea. What would a car be doing here? Somebody would report it first thing tomorrow. He tried to back it out but the rear wheels were sunk hub deep in sand and wouldn’t rock free. Well, he was tired of fooling with it. He took a towel from his bag and gave the door handles and the interior a good wiping down. It had been a proud day when he had given the Marine Corps his fingerprints and now they were up there in some drawer in Washington waiting to do him in. He ran his hand under the seat to see if he had left any clues. Any peanuts or guitar picks or things they could look at through a microscope. It smelled a little of Miss Phillips down there. He burned the fiber envelope and its contents and then he zipped up his bag and slung the guitar across his back and walked a good three miles back toward town to the nearest filling station. He stood on the highway under the station’s harsh blue mercury lights and swatted bugs out of his face.
THE SUN WAS COMING UP before he got a ride. It was a bread truck. The driver was a round sloping man who was wearing an official bread hat with a sunburst medallion and a T-shirt that was so thin hairs were breaking through it. A bulldozer watch fob lay on his lap. Norwood thought at first he had rubber bands around his wrists. They were fat and dimpled like baby wrists.
“This is against the rules,” said the bread man, “but I just can’t pass a man up. My wife says I’m too kind for my own good.”
“Well, I sure appreciate it,” said Norwood. “I was getting pretty tired.”
The truck was a delivery model with no passenger seat and Norwood had to sit on a wooden bread box. He laid the guitar across his knees. There was a bad shimmy in the front wheels and this made the guitar bounce and hum.
“I’ll have to make a few stops, but a man begging a ride ought to be glad to get whatever he can.”
“This is fine. I appreciate it too.”
“Have you got a dollar to help on the gas?”
Norwood gave him a dollar. “Do you have to pay for your own gas?”
The man looked straight ahead. “Sometimes I do.”
“How much does a job like this pay?” said Norwood. “A bread job?”
“Well, it don’t pay as much as heavy construction work but you don’t have to work as hard neither. I used to drive a D-8 cat till I hurt my back. Didn’t do anything while I was on workmen’s compensation. Just went to the show all the time. I like The Road Runner.”
“Yeah, I do too.”
“I could watch that scutter for an hour.”
“I believe I could too.”
The bread man began to rumble with quiet laughter. “That coyote or whatever he is, a wolf or something, every time he gets up on a clift or somewhere with a new plan, why the Road Runner comes along on some skates or has him some new invention like a rocket or a big wrecker’s ball and just busts that coyote a good one.” He laughed some more, then fell into repose. In a minute or two his face clouded with a darker memory. “Noveltoons are not any good at all,” he said. “It’s usually a shoemaker and a bunch of damn mice singing. When one of them comes on I get up and go get me a sack of corn or something.”
They shimmied on down the road. At the first stop, a roadside grocery store, Norwood got a quart of milk and had the grocer make him a couple of baloney and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise. He leaned on the meat box and ate and watched the bread man do his stuff. The bread man carried old bread out and brought new bread in. He squatted down and arranged it on the rack. Norwood noticed that he was poking finger holes in the competitors’ loaves. Their eyes met, just for a second, and the bread man looked away. He tried to recover by doing peculiar things with his hands, as though he had a funny way of arranging bread. Norwood was not deceived. The bread man had no gift for pantomime and he did not seem to consider that from a range of eight or nine feet it is easy enough to tell whether someone is or is not punching holes in bread.
He said nothing about it and neither did Norwood. But back on the road the guilty knowledge hung heavy over the conversation. The bread man tried to get something going again. He asked Norwood if that was a Gibson guitar, but before Norwood could answer the man said, “My whole family is musical. Some families are like that. My sister used to play trombone solos in church. Daddy played the accordion and we would all sing. He could really play that thing. And didn’t know note one.”
“They’re hard to beat,” said Norwood, agreeably. “I like to hear a good accordion.”
“Daddy passed on two days after Labor Day of 1951,” said the bread man, forestalling any suggestion that they go hear the old gentleman play.
They picked up another hitchhiker. This one was carrying a sack of garden tomatoes. Norwood made room for him on the box. The man was grateful and deeply apologetic and he insisted on shaking their hands. Norwood had never seen a man so happy to get a ride. “This sure is nice of you,” he kept saying.
“I’m not supposed to do it,” said the bread man. “I just don’t like to pass anybody up. Might need a ride myself sometime. How far are you going?”
“I’m going on in to Indianapolis. My wife is in the hospital there. She doesn’t have any sweat glands.”
“I never had a cold in my life,” said the bread man.
“It was sure nice of you to stop like that. A lot of people are scared of hitchhikers. I guess you can’t blame ’em.”
“Have you got a dollar to help on the gas?”
The man looked frightened. “No sir, I sure don’t. All I got i
s sixty cents and I was going to get my wife some ice cream with that. That’s why I’m thumbing. I’m supposed to get a little check Friday.”
The bread man stopped the truck and nodded at Norwood. “Well, it wouldn’t be fair to him if I let you ride. He paid his dollar.”
“I don’t care,” said Norwood, “It’s all right with me.”
But the bread man made no move to get the truck going again. He looked impassively into the distance.
“I tell you what, if you’ll let me ride I’ll try to do something nice for somebody else on down the road. I’ll return the favor that way. I’ll do somebody else a good deed and tell them to pass it on. . . . Maybe it’ll go all the way around the world. . . .”
It was no use. The man got out with his sack of tomatoes after riding fifty yards. “Well . . . thank you anyway. . . . I’m sorry . . . if it was Friday I would have the money.” He was pained at having caused trouble. Everybody was right but him.
The bread man drove away and glanced at Norwood to see how he was taking it. “He wasn’t going to do anything for anybody down the road. That was a load of crap.”
“I think he would have,” said Norwood. “You ought to let him ride.”
“You think so, huh? Why didn’t you pay his dollar?”
“I didn’t think about that. I guess I could have. . . . Let’s go back and get him.”
“I’m not running a bus service. Anyway, I didn’t like his personality.”
“You should of let him ride.”
“Maybe you don’t like my personality.”
“I don’t know you very well.”
“Maybe you think I have personality trouble.”
“I just don’t know you.”
“That’s not any kind of answer. Why don’t you say what you think? You think I don’t know that some people don’t like me because of my personality? I know that. My wife wants me to take a course. They’re giving one at the hotel next week that’s supposed to help you in sales work. It makes people like you.”
“Why don’t you take it?”
“What do you know about it? You’re just a hitchhiker begging rides.”
“Well . . .”
“You saw me back there roughing up that bread, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“I got nothing to hide. They started it. What do you want me to do?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“You mighty right it’s not. The Vita-White guys step on my bread. Mash it all in with their feet. No telling what kind of germs is on their shoes. They don’t care. A little child’s death don’t mean anything to them.”
“I believe I’ll get out along here, just anywhere.”
“I’m going on in to town.”
“I believe I’ll get out anyway.”
“That’s fine with me. I’ll be glad to get rid of you. You’re not friendly.”
He pulled over on the shoulder and stopped short. Norwood said, “much oblige,” and got out.
“You need to do something about your personality, hitchhiker. That’s what you need.”
“What you need is about forty dollars worth of front end work on this truck,” said Norwood. “Some new kingpins.”
“I hope don’t nobody pick you up.”
“No use in you hoping that. Somebody will.”
At a pool hall in Indianapolis a rack boy with a Junior Tracy haircut and a good opinion of himself told Norwood that if he was going to New York he wouldn’t bother with hitchhiking, he would go out to the Pennsylvania yards and catch him a freight train. Norwood shot snooker with him most of the afternoon and lost $2.75, then downed two chili dogs and went out to the rail yards and wandered around in the dark.
He had never done this before. There were tracks and more tracks and empty flatcars and switch engines banging around and trains coming in and trains going out. The thing was to ask somebody. He walked over to the station and talked to a Negro man in coveralls who was pushing a mail buggy. The man pointed out a freight train that was being made up for Philadelphia and said be careful. Norwood circled all the way around to the end of the train—instead of just crawling over a coupling—and came back up the other side where it was darker. He walked along like an inspector giving all the boxcar hatches a shake, and finally found one he liked. It was a faded blue L & N car with a banged-up door that wouldn’t close all the way. No one could lock that door on him. He slid it back and struck a match and looked in. Big sacks of flour, hundred-pounders, were stacked high at each end of the car, almost to the roof. There was an open space in the middle of the car. He pushed his bag and guitar in and climbed in after them.
It was pitch-dark inside and hot, close, airless. Well, he would be riding at night. It would be cooler when they started moving. The floor was nothing but splinters. He wished he had a flashlight. It was probably dangerous striking matches with all that flour. He pulled some of the sacks down and fashioned himself a place to sleep. It looked like a nest for some bird that never lived on this earth. He slipped his boots off and settled back into it and tipped his hat over his eyes range style. No. Better be ready for a fast move. Better put the boots back on. Like getting caught by the gooks in one of those sleeping bags that zipped only halfway down. A suicide bag. He ate a dime Payday and then peeled an orange and ate it and lay there quiet and watchful in that ghostly Pillsbury darkness until the train moved.
It started with a clanging jerk. Norwood was half asleep. He turned on his side and adjusted his hat. Drops of sweat ran across his back and tickled. He was sweating like a hog. Did hogs sweat? No. That’s why they like mudholes. Mules did, and horses. Out in the sun they had shiny wet skins. He tried to remember what a hog’s skin looked like out in the sun. He couldn’t remember seeing a hog in the sun. For any length of time. Hogs didn’t have to work. Had anybody ever tried to make one work? Maybe they tried it a long time ago in history, and just gave up. And told their sons not to bother with it any more. Better not leave the guitar out loose like that. All kinds of folks riding trains. He looped the shoulder cord around his wrist a couple of times. The bag was under his head, safe. Everything was secured. The head is secured. Some boot standing there at the door with a swab at port arms trying to keep you out. Even when it was secured for regimental inspection they had to keep one bowl and one urinal open. Everybody knew that. Why did they keep on trying to pull that swab on you? Norwood dozed and woke and blew flour out of his nose and slept and groaned and dreamed crazy dreams about Miss Phillips. The train stopped and started all night long. It seemed to last about three days.
The train was slowing for the block in Philadelphia when Norwood suddenly awoke. He was asleep one second and wide awake the next. A thin wall of sunlight was coming through the doorway crack, with a lot of stuff dancing around in it. Something was wrong. It was his feet. He felt air on his feet. He sat up and there wasn’t anything on them except a pair of J. C. Penney Argyles. Somebody had taken his thirty-eight-dollar stovepipe boots right off his feet. “Son of a bitch!” He got up and climbed over the floor and pulled sacks this way and that way but there was no one to be found, and no boots.
Soon it was so thick with flour dust in the car that he had to slam one of the doors back and stick his head out for air. The trouble was, two of the sacks had broken. After he caught his breath he dragged them over and pushed them out. The second one snagged on the bad door and hung there for a moment blowing flour up in his face. Then he began flinging sacks out, good ones, till he got a cramp in his neck.
The train entered the yard with long blasts from the diesel horn and as it lurched in for a stop Norwood grabbed up his gear and bailed out in his sock feet. It stung. He squatted there and looked long and hard up and down the train, through the wheels, to see if anybody else was jumping off. Nobody. He dusted himself off, whacking his trousers with his hat, and decided to do some backtracking along the roadbed.
He couldn’t walk far. The rocks and clinkers hurt his feet and he sat
down on a stack of crossties to put on another layer of socks. While he was sitting there smoking a cigarette he saw two men in the distance coming up the tracks. One of them was wearing a luminous orange jacket. It was blinding. He might have had some job that required him to be easily spotted by aircraft. Norwood waited.
The one with the jacket was a tall whiskery man. He was also wearing a St. Louis Cardinal’s baseball cap. By his side, stepping smartly along with a knotty walking stick, was a short angry little man with a knapsack on his back. He was covered from head to toe with flour, except right around his eyes and mouth.
“What happened to you, neighbor?” said Norwood.
“You should of seen it,” said the man with the Cardinal cap. “Some thug was throwing flour out of a boxcar and Eugene here was walking along not thinking about anything when one of ’em hit him. One of them sacks.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Well, it didn’t hurt him, but it didn’t help him none either.”
He wanted to stop and talk about it some more, the sexagenarian Cardinal, but his short chum kept moving. He didn’t even glance at Norwood. He looked like a man who was going somewhere to report something. Norwood had to run around in front of him to stop him. “Hey wait a minute. I better have a look in that pack. Somebody got my boots last night.” The flour man looked up and fixed Norwood with two evil red eyes, but said nothing. The Cardinal did not like the turn things had taken. Maybe he could explain it again.
“We don’t know anything about any boots. Eugene got hit with some flour, that’s all. Some thug was throwing it off the train. I got hit with a mail pouch myself once but it wasn’t anything like this. This was like a flour bomb went off.”
Norwood moved around behind the flour man and reached up to undo the straps on the knapsack. With that, the flour man went into action. He was like lightning. He was a tiger. He spun around and hit Norwood on the arms three or four times with his stick and when it broke he popped Norwood in the mouth with a straight left and then he jumped up on his back and stuck there like a small white bear. The knapsack on his back was like a yet smaller bear.