Read Anybody Can Do Anything for Free Online Page A

seat and they quieted down to only occasional silly giggles. We started up again and after a while drove onto the dock and the big bus lumbered aboard the ferry and all of us passengers got out and went upstairs for supper.
    Anne and Joan and I shared our booth in the ferry’s small smoky restaurant with a Mrs. Johnson, a large woman in navy blue and steel-rimmed spectacles, whose eyes very handily operated on different circuits so that while her left eye looked out the window, her right eye was fixed on the waitress or on her food or on me. Mrs. Johnson told me immediately that her ankles swelled and everything she ate talked back to her but she was going “upsound” to get recruits for Jesus. I told her that I was going to Seattle to work in an office.
    She said, “The city is a wicked place full of the works of the Devil. Stay on the farm. Jesus is on the farm.” I said that I had heard that He was everywhere but I hadn’tnoticed Him on our farm. Mrs. Johnson, who was busily fishing the lettuce out of her hamburger and putting it on a napkin beside her plate, said, “Praise His name! Praise His name! You can always count me out when it comes to greens. Just like ground glass in my intestynes.”
    I said, “I’m going to live with my family.” She gestured with her fork and one eye toward Anne and Joan, who were quietly eating scrambled eggs, and said, “The Devil is in the city. Have those poor little tykes been babtyzed?” I said no and she said, “Throw them in. Throw them in! Wash their sins away. Praise His name.”
    Just then the waitress brought her apple pie a la mode and my coffee. Tapping on my cup with her spoon she said, “I like coffee but it don’t like me. Binds me up tighter’n a drum. Without it I keep regular as clockwork, but let me drink one cup and I’m threw off for a week.” She fixed her great big good eye on me and waited and I was not sure whether she expected me to say, “Praise His name, praise His name,” or to retaliate with a list of foods that bound me up, so I said, “Wasn’t it funny on the bus when the Indian fell in the aisle?”
    Mrs. Johnson swelled her nostrils until they were like twin smudge pots and said, “I am going to report that driver to headquarters. He took the name of the Lord Jesus our God in Heaven in vain.” I said, “Well, he has a boil on his neck.” She said, “Poison coming out of his system. Blasphemy is a stench in the nostrils of God and I’m going to report that driver.”
    I was pleased to note, when the ferry docked an hour or so later and we all climbed aboard the bus, that the only scat left for Mrs. Johnson, who was late, was way in the back with the Indians, by then much drunker and much noisier and destined to be a stench in the nostrils of both Mrs. Johnson and God before we reached Seattle.
    It was dark and still raining when we landed. The waterwas gray and rough and the ferry banged into the dolphins and backed up several times before it was able to edge into the slip and the deckhands could let down the flimsy chain that had presumably kept the bus from plunging off the deck into the water.
    As we rumbled onto the dock a train, bleating mournfully, and with the beam from its terrible fiery eye swinging across the water, came hurtling along the shore. The children, who had never seen a train before, were terrified. “What is it? What is it?” wailed Anne, as it streaked past, clackety, clackety, clackety, woooooo, woooooo, its lighted windows a ribbon of light in the rainy evening. “It’s a train, darling. A nice choo-choo train,” I told her comfortingly. She said, “It is not. It’s a Mickaboo full of Bojanes.”
    To Anne all frightening things were Bojanes and Bojanes lived in Mickaboos, which were nailholes or tiny cracks in the floor. Now apparently Bojanes flew through the night inside fiery dragons. Anne wailed, “Take it away, Betty, take it away.” And I did. I shooed it around another curve and it went