Read Online Norwood by Charles Portis - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œWhat happened to you, neighbor?” said Norwood.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œWas he hurt?”
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œWe 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