Free Norwood by Charles Portis Page A

springs in them so you couldn’t let the water run. A man bumped him and said “Sorry” and Norwood quickly checked his billfold and made sure the hip pocket was buttoned. This was the kind of place pickpockets liked. Those boogers had quick hands. Be all in your clothes and you wouldn’t know it. He dried off under a hot air blower.
    Outside, a porter pointed him toward Times Square. As he made his way up Seventh Avenue a man with puffy eyes (dope fiend?) stopped him and tried to sell him a four-color ball-point pen for a dollar. Norwood brushed him off. What did they think, that he was somebody who would buy something like that on the street? No telling what they were thinking, the way he looked. That he would be amazed at a lot of things. Like Tarzan’s New York Adventure.
    He looked at the movie posters on both sides of Forty-second Street and had a glass of beer and some giant corrugated French fries. The windows were full of many good buys in transistor radios and field glasses. Did any one live upstairs over the movie theaters? He saw himself on television at Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, and looked at all the curios downstairs, believing most of them but not believing the one about Marshal W. M. Pitman of Wharton, Texas, shooting a bullet right into a crook’s gun in 1932. Still, there was the gun, and why would they make it up? Across the street he watched a man with a beanie at a sewing machine. The man was talking like Donald Duck and sewing names on other beanies. Stella and Fred and Ernie. His workmanship was good. How did he get that job? What did it pay? Being able to sew names and talk like Donald Duck. He walked up as far as Fifty-ninth Street, where things began to peter out, then came back. There was a man in a Mr. Peanut outfit in front of the Planters place but he was not giving out sample nuts, he was just walking back and forth. The Mr. Peanut casing looked hot. It looked thick enough to give protection against small arms fire.
    â€œDo they pay you by the hour or what?” Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.
    â€œYeah, by the hour,” said a wary, muffled voice inside.
    â€œI bet that suit is heavy.”
    â€œIt’s not all that heavy. I just started this morning.”
    â€œHow much do you get a hour?”
    â€œYou ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
    â€œDo you take the suit home with you?”
    â€œNo, I put it on down here. At the shop.”
    â€œThe one in Dallas gives out free nuts.”
    â€œI don’t know anything about that. They didn’t say anything to me about it.”
    â€œHe don’t give you many, just two or three cashews.”
    â€œI don’t know anything about that. I work at the post office at night.”
    â€œWell, I’ll see you sometime, Mr. Peanut. You take it easy.”
    â€œOkay. You too.”
    A woman in the Times Square Information Center, about forty but with a smooth powdered neck he wouldn’t have minded biting, gave him a subway map and told him that the best way to get to the East Eleventh Street address was to take the BMT to Union Square, then change to the Fourteenth Street-Canarsie line going east and get off at First Avenue. It was impossible to remember. On his way to the subway entrance he stopped at a shoeshine parlor to ask again. Or it was not so much a parlor as a notch in the wall with room for only one chair and the shine man himself, who was small and dark and aproned.
    â€œSay—”
    â€œBeat it, fellow,” said the shine man, not looking up from his work. “I don’t have time to answer questions.”
    â€œI just wanted to know—”
    â€œYou wanna know something, ask a cop. They get paid for it. I pay two hundred dollars a month for this rathole and at twenty cents a shine that means I got to shine two thousand individual shoes just to pay the rent.”
    Norwood forgot his own problem at once.