Old needle-face, curler-durler Bailey stuck her pickle puss out the door and whoo-whooed. “Nora! Hurry with those magazines! I want you to pull rugs while Harmony and I lift things.”
And you couldn’t pull them exactly where she wanted them, Nora calculated, if you measured with a solid gold ruler. They’d be lifting and straining and getting red faces—old snoodle-snozzle Bailey would—did colored people get redder?—while she tried to get the Orientals the way they wanted them. Tried and tried and tried and tried.
Nora didn’t so much run away as drift away.
She didn’t so much desert her assignment as take time out.
She didn’t even expect to go as far as Crystal Lake, where the kids in the neighborhood would be coasting. Though it wasn’t much, as coasting went, since her own father had said it was hardly fifty vertical feet from the street to the lake. Green Prairie wasn’t noteworthy for hills.
Nora walked, rather rapidly and looking back frequently, down Walnut, across Sedmon to River Avenue. Crystal Lake lay beyond, quite a distance, beyond Arkansas and Dumond and Lake View; and a block south besides. Nora thought she better not go that far. Moreover, she had eighteen cents, and there were stores on River Avenue. Not many and not big, but stores, including the Greek’s.
She turned north on River Avenue.
Harry and Everett, the two boys who lived over Schneider’s Delicatessen, and went to parochial school, were standing on the corner, at Maple Street. A police car had just gone by, its siren loud, and now another was screaming in the distance. Nora stood at the corner to watch the second cruise car approach, pass and vanish. Only then was she recognized. Harry said, “Hi, Nora.”
“’Lo.”
“Musta been a robbery, or somethin’!”