Norwood Read Free Page B

did not like the sound of Bill Bird’s voice. Bill Bird was originally from some place in Michigan and Norwood found his brisk Yankee vowels offensive. They argued about the bathroom. Bill Bird had made himself a little home in that bathroom. He used all the hot water. He filled up the cabinet with dozens of little bottles with typing on them, crowding Norwood’s shaving gear out and onto the windowsill. He used Norwood’s blades. He left hairs stuck around in the soap—short, gray, unmistakable Bill Bird hairs. Norwood had built the bathroom, it was his, and the thought of Bill Bird’s buttocks sliding around on the bottom of the modern Sears tub was disagreeable. They argued about the Marine Corps. Bill Bird said it was vastly overrated. He cited personal experiences and magazine articles. For all the Marines’ talk of the Halls of Montezuma, he said, there had actually been only a handful of Marines at the siege of Chapultepec. Regular army troops, as usual, had won the day there.
    Norwood said he had been told by people who knew that certain army units in Korea in 1950 had abandoned their weapons and equipment and even their wounded while under Chinese attack. Many of the wounded had been rescued by Marines. Bill Bird said he knew this to be untrue. He also informed Norwood that it was a Federal offense to strike a disabled veteran, not to say ruinous damage-wise in the courts. They argued too about Norwood’s plan to leave his job at the Nipper station and strike out blindly for Shreveport and a musical career on the Louisiana Hayride, the celebrated Country and Western show presented Saturday nights on KWKH, a 50,000-watt clear channel station serving the Ark-LaTex. It was foolish, Bill Bird said, to leave a job before you were sure you had another job. Vernell said that made plenty of sense to her. Bill Bird said that if you had a job you could always get a job, Vernell concurred. He went on to say that it was hard to get a job if you did not already have a job. “Bill is right about that,” said Vernell. They argued about the seventy-dollar debt and ways and means of collecting it. Bill Bird said the best approach would be to pay some lawyer ten or fifteen dollars to write that fellow a scare letter. “Then I would be out eighty-five dollars,” said Norwood. Well, said Bill Bird, he, for one, was tired of hearing about that confounded seventy dollars.
    The compactness of the Pratt house was such that three-way conversations could be and very often were carried on from three different rooms, with none of the parties visible to the others. “You beat anything I ever saw, bubba,” said Vernell, who was in the bedroom ironing on this night. “We’re both of us making good money now and we got the house fixed up and you’ve got your car and Bill’s here and you just want to throw it all to one side and take off for Shreveport. You don’t even know anybody in Shreveport.”
    Norwood was sitting at the kitchen table eating a warmed-over supper. He’d been late getting home from the station and they had not waited. He kept his hat on while he ate, his pale green Nipper hat with the black bill. It was a model the Miami Police Department had used in 1934. He held his left thumb in a glass of ice water. The thumb, sticky with shaving cream, was swelling and throbbing and purpling. He had fixed flats that day for three big state gravel trucks, one after the other, and when he was breaking down one of the wheels a locking ring had snapped back on his thumb.
    â€œWell, when you get in Shreveport and run out of money,” came the Michigan voice of Bill Bird, through a cloud of bathroom steam, “Vernell and I will not be able to send you any.”
    Norwood speared a sausage patty with his fork and gave it a hard flip through the bathroom doorway.
    â€œHey!” said Bill Bird. “All right now!” He emerged from the steam in some green