Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “They are twenty-two and a half,” the clerk said.

  “All right. I’ll take them. How late do you keep open at night?”

  “Until six.”

  “Hell! I’ll be out at the airport then. I won’t get back to town until seven. How about getting them then?” Another clerk came up: the manager, the floor-walker.

  “You mean you don’t want them now?” the first said.

  “No,” Jiggs said. “How about getting them at seven?”

  “What is it?” the second clerk said.

  “Says he wants a pair of boots. Says he can’t get back from the airport before seven o’clock.”

  The second looked at Jiggs. “You a flyer?”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Listen. Leave a guy here. I’ll be back by seven. I’ll need them to-night.”

  The second also looked down at Jiggs’ feet. “Why not take them now?”

  Jiggs didn’t answer at all. He just said, “So I’ll have to wait until to-morrow.”

  “Unless you can get back before six,” the second said. “O.K.,” Jiggs said. “All right, mister. How much do you want down?” Now they both looked at him: at the face, the hot eyes: the entire appearance articulate and complete, badge regalia and passport, of an oblivious and incorrigible insolvency. “To keep them for me. That pair in the window.”

  The second looked at the first. “Do you know his size?”

  “That’s all right about that,” Jiggs said. “How much?”

  The second looked at Jiggs. “You pay ten dollars and we will hold them for you until to-morrow.”

  “Ten dollars? Jesus, mister. You mean ten per cent. I could pay ten per cent, down and buy an aeroplane.”

  “You want to pay ten per cent, down?”

  “Yair. Ten per cent. Call for them this afternoon if I can get back from the airport in time.”

  “That will be two and a quarter,” the second said. When Jiggs put his hand into his pocket they could follow it, fingernail and knuckle, the entire length of the pocket, like watching the ostrich in the movie cartoon swallow the alarm clock. It emerged a fist and opened upon a wadded dollar bill and coins of all sizes. He put the bill into the first clerk’s hand and began to count the coins on to the bill.

  “There’s fifty,” he said. “Seventy-five. And fifteen’s ninety, and twenty-five is...” His voice stopped; he became motionless, with the twenty-five-cent piece in his left hand and a half-dollar and four nickels on his right palm. The clerks watched him put the quarter back into his right hand and take up the four nickels. “Let’s see,” he said. “We had ninety, and twenty will be...”

  “Two dollars and ten cents,” the second said. “Take back two nickels and give him the quarter.”

  “Two and a dime,” Jiggs said. “How about taking that down?”

  “You were the one who suggested ten per cent.”

  “I can’t help that. How about two and a dime?”

  “Take it,” the second said. The first took the money and went away. Again the second watched Jiggs’ hand move downward along his leg, and then he could even see the two coins at the end of the pocket, through the soiled cloth.

  “Where do you get this bus to the airport?” Jiggs said. The other told him. Now the first returned, with the cryptic scribbled duplicate of the sale; and now they both looked into the hot interrogation of the eyes.

  “They will be ready for you when you call,” the second said. “Yair; sure,” Jiggs said. “But get them out of the window.”

  “You want to examine them?”

  “No. I just want to see them come out of that window.” So again outside the window, his rubber soles resting upon that light confetti spatter more forlorn than spattered paint since it had neither inherent weight nor cohesiveness to hold it anywhere, which even during the time that Jiggs was in the store had decreased, thinned, vanishing particle by particle into nothing like foam does, he stood until the hand came into the window and drew the boots out. Then he went on, walking fast with his short bouncing curiously stiff-kneed gait. When he turned into Grandlieu Street he could see a clock, though he was already hurrying or rather walking at his fast stiff hard gait like a mechanical toy that has but one speed, and though the clock’s face was still in the shadow of the opposite street side and what sunlight there was was still high, diffused, suspended in soft refraction by the heavy damp bayou-and-swamp-suspired air. There was confetti here too, and broken serpentine, in neat narrow swept windrows against wall angles and lightly vulcanized along the gutter rims by the flushing fireplugs of the past dawn, while, upcaught and pinned by the cryptic significant shields to door-front and lamp-post, the purple-and-gold bunting looped unbroken as a trolley wire above his head as he walked, turning at last at right angles to cross the street itself and meet that one on the opposite side making its angle too, to join over the centre of the street as though to form an aerial and bottomless regal-coloured cattle chute suspended at first floor level above the earth, and suspending beneath itself in turn, the outward-facing cheese-cloth-lettered interdiction which Jiggs, passing, slowed looking back to read: Grandlieu Street CLOSED To Traffic 8.0 P.M. — Midnight.

  Now he could see the bus at the kerb, where they had told him it would be, with its cloth banner fastened by the four corners across its broad stem to ripple and flap in motion, and the wooden sandwich board at the kerb too: Bluehound to Feinman Airport 15c. The driver stood beside the open door; he too watched Jiggs’ knuckles travel the length of the pocket. “Airport?” Jiggs said.

  “Yes,” the driver said. “You got a ticket?”

  “I got seventy-five cents. Won’t that do?”

  “A ticket into the airport. Or a workman’s pass. The passenger buses don’t begin to run until noon.” Jiggs looked at the driver with that hot pleasant interrogation, holding his breeches by one hand while he drew the other out of the pocket. “Are you working out there?” the driver said.

  “Oh,” Jiggs said. “Sure. I’m Roger Shumann’s mechanic. You want to see my licence?”

  “That’ll be all right,” the driver said. “Get aboard.” In the driver’s seat there lay folded a paper: one of the coloured ones, the pink or the green editions of the diurnal dog-watches, with a thick heavy type-splattered front page filled with ejaculations and pictures. Jiggs paused, stooped, turning.

  “Have a look at your paper, cap,” he said. But the driver did not answer. Jiggs took up the paper and sat in the next seat and took from his shirt pocket a crumpled cigarette-pack, up-ended it and shook into his other palm two cigarette-stubs and put the longer one back into the crumpled paper and into his shirt again. He lit the shorter one, pursing it away from his face and slanting his head aside to keep the match flame from his nose. Three more men entered the bus, two of them in overalls and the third in a kind of porter’s cap made of or covered by purple-and-gold cloth in alternate stripes, and then the driver came and sat sideways in his seat.

  “You got a ship in the race to-day, have you?” he said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “In the three-seventy-five cubic inch.”

  “How does it look to you? Do you think you will have a chance?”

  “We might if they would let us fly it in the two hundred cubic inch,” Jiggs said. He took three quick draws from the cigarette-stub like darting a stick at a snake and snapped it through the still-open door as though it were the snake, or maybe a spider, and opened the paper. “Ship’s obsolete. It was fast two years ago, but that’s two years ago. We’d be O.K. now if they had just quit building racers when they finished the one we got.

  There ain’t another pilot out there except Shumann that could have even qualified it.”

  “Shumann’s good, is he?”

  “They’re all good,” Jiggs said, looking at the paper. It spread its pale green surface: heavy, black-splotched, staccato: Airport Dedication Special; in the exact middle the photograph of a plump, bland, innocently sensual Levantine face beneath a raked fedora hat; the upper p
art of a thick body buttoned tight and soft into a peaked light-coloured double-breasted suit with a carnation in the lapel: the photograph inletted like a medallion into a drawing full of scrolled wings and propeller symbols which enclosed a shield-shaped pen-and-ink reproduction of something apparently cast in metal and obviously in existence somewhere and lettered in gothic relief:

  FEINMAN AIRPORT

  NEW VALOIS, FRANCIANA Dedicated to

  THE AVIATORS OF AMERICA

  and

  COLONEL H. I. FEINMAN,

  Chairman Sewage Board

  Through Whose Undeviating Vision and Unflagging

  Effort This Airport was Raised Up and Created out

  of the Waste Land at the Bottom of Lake Rambaud

  at a Cost of One Million Dollars

  “This Feinman,” Jiggs said. “He must be a big son of a bitch.”

  “He’s a son of a bitch all right,” the driver said. “I guess you’d call him big too.”

  “He gave you guys a nice airport, anyway,” Jiggs said.

  “Yair,” the driver said. “Somebody did.”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “It must have been him. I notice he’s got his name on it here and there.”

  “Here and there; yair,” the driver said. “In electric lights on both hangars and on the floor and the ceiling of the lobby and four times on each lamp-post and a guy told me the beacon spells it too but I don’t know about that because I don’t know the Morse code.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Jiggs said. Now a fair crowd of men, in the overalls or the purple-and-gold caps, appeared suddenly and began to enter the bus, so that for the time the scene began to resemble that comic stage one where the entire army enters one taxi-cab and drives away. But there was room for all of them and then the door swung in and the bus moved away and Jiggs sat back, looking out. The bus swung immediately away from Grandlieu Street and Jiggs watched himself plunging between iron balconies, catching fleeting glimpses of dirty paved courts as the bus seemed to rush with tremendous clatter and speed through cobbled streets which did not look wide enough to admit it, between low brick walls which seemed to sweat a rich slow over-fecund smell of fish and coffee and sugar, and another odour profound faint and distinctive as a musty priest’s robe: of some spartan effluvium of mediaeval convents.

  Then the bus ran out of this and began to run, faster still, through a long avenue between palm-bordered bearded live oak groves and then suddenly Jiggs saw that the live oaks stood not in earth but in water so motionless and thick as to make no reflection, as if it had been poured about the trunks and allowed to set. The bus ran suddenly past a row of flimsy cabins whose fronts rested upon the shell foundation of the road itself and whose rears rested upon stilts to which row-boats were tied and between which nets hung drying, and he saw that the roofs were thatched with the smoke-coloured growth which hung from the trees, before they flicked away and the bus ran again over-arched by the oak boughs from which the moss hung straight and windless as the beards of old men sitting in the sun. “Jesus,” Jiggs said. “If a man don’t own a boat here he can’t even go to the can, can he?”

  “Your first visit down here?” the driver said. “Where you from?”

  “Anywhere,” Jiggs said. “The place I’m staying away from right now is Kansas.”

  “Family there, huh?”

  “Yair. I got two kids there; I guess I still got the wife too.”

  “So you pulled out.”

  “Yair. Jesus, I couldn’t even keep back enough to have my shoes half-soled. Every time I did a job her or the sheriff would catch the guy and get the money before I could tell him I was through; I would make a parachute jump and one of them would have the jack and be on the way back to town before I even pulled the rip-cord.” —

  “For Christ’s sake,” the driver said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said, looking out at the back-rushing trees. “This guy Feinman could spend some more of the money giving these trees a haircut, couldn’t he?” Now the bus, the road, ran out of the swamp though without mounting, with no hill to elevate it; it ran now upon a flat plain of saw-grass and of cypress and oak stumps... a pocked desolation of some terrific and apparently purposeless reclamation across which the shell road ran ribbon-blanched towards something low and dead ahead of it — something low, unnatural: a chimera quality which for the moment prevented one from comprehending that it had been built by man and for a purpose. The thick heavy air was full now of a smell thicker, heavier, though there was yet no water in sight; there was only the soft pale sharp chimera-shape above which pennons floated against a further drowsy immensity which the mind knew must be water, apparently separated from the flat earth by a mirage line so that, taking shape now as a doublewinged building, it seemed to float lightly like the apocryphal turreted and battlemented cities in the coloured Sunday sections, where beneath sill-less and floorless arches people with yellow and blue flesh pass and repass: myriad, purposeless, and free from gravity. Now the bus, swinging, presented in broadside the low broad main building with its two hangar wings, modernistic, crenellated, with its façade faintly Moorish or Californian beneath the gold-and-purple pennons whipping in a breeze definitely from water and giving to it an air both aerial and aquatic like a mammoth terminal for some species of machine of a yet unvisioned to-morrow, to which air earth and water will be as one. And viewed from the bus across a plaza of beautiful and incredible grass labyrinthed by concrete driveways which Jiggs will not for two or three days yet recognize to be miniature replicas of the concrete runways on the field itself, a mathematic monogram of two capital F’s laid by compass to all the winds. The bus ran into one of these, slowing between the bloodless grapes of lamp-globes on bronze poles; as Jiggs got out he stopped to look at the four F’s cast into the quadrants of the base before going on.

  He went around the main building and followed a narrow alley like a gutter, ending in a blank and knobless door; he put his hand too among the handprints in oil or grease on the door and pushed through it into a narrow alcove walled by neatly ranked and numbered tools from a faint and cavernous murmur. The alcove contained a lavatory, a row of hooks from which depended garments — civilian shirts and coats, one pair of trousers with dangling braces, the rest greasy dungarees, one of which Jiggs took down and stepped into and bounced lightly up and around his shoulders all in one motion, already moving towards a second door built mostly of chicken-wire and through which he could now see the hangar itself, the glass-and-steel cavern, the aeroplanes, the racers. Wasp-waisted, wasp-light, still, trim, vicious, small and immobile, they seemed to poise without weight, as though made of paper for the sole purpose of resting upon the shoulders of the dungaree-clad men about them. With their soft bright paint tempered somewhat by the steel-filtered light of the hangar they rested for the most part complete and intact, with whatever it was that the mechanics were doing to them of such a subtle and technical nature as to be invisible to the lay eye, save for one. Unbonneted, its spare entrails revealed as serrated top-and-bottom lines of delicate rocker arms and rods, inferential in their very myriad delicacy of a weightless and terrific speed any momentary faltering of which would be the irreparable difference between motion and mere matter, it appeared more profoundly derelict than the half-eaten carcass of a deer come suddenly upon in a forest.

  Jiggs paused, still fastening the coverall’s throat, and looked across the hangar at the three people busy about it — two of a size and one taller, all in dungarees although one of the two shorter ones was topped by a blob of savage meal-coloured hair which even from here did not look like man’s hair. He did not approach at once; still fastening the coverall he looked on and saw, in another clump of dungarees beside another aeroplane, a small tow-headed boy in khaki miniature of the men, even to the grease. “Jesus Christ,” Jiggs thought. “He’s done smeared oil on them already. Laverne will give him hell.” He approached on his short bouncing legs; already he could hear the boy talking in the loud assured carrying voice of
a spoiled middle-western child. He came up and put out his blunt hard grease-grained hand and scoured the boy’s head.

  “Look out,” the boy said. Then he said, “Where you been?

  Laverne and Roger—” Jiggs scoured the boy’s head again and then crouched, his fists up, his head drawn down into his shoulders in burlesque pantomime. But the boy just looked at him. “Laverne and Roger—” he said again.

  “Who’s your old man to-day, kid?” Jiggs said. Now the boy moved. With absolutely no change of expression he lowered his head and rushed at Jiggs, his fists flailing at the man. Jiggs ducked, taking the blows while the boy hammered at him with puny and deadly purpose; now the other men had all turned to watch, with wrenches and tools and engine parts in their suspended hands. “Who’s your old man, huh?” Jiggs said, holding the boy off and then lifting and holding him away while he still hammered at Jiggs’ head with that grim and puny purpose. “All right!” Jiggs cried. He set the boy down and held him off, still ducking and dodging and now blind since the peaked cap was jammed over his face and the boy’s hard light little fists hammering upon the cap. “Oke! Oke!” Jiggs cried. “I quit! I take it back!” He stood back and tugged the cap off his face and then he found why the boy had ceased: that he and the men too with their arrested tools and safety wire and engine parts were now looking at something which had apparently crept from a doctor’s cupboard and, in the snatched garments of an etherized patient in a charity ward, escaped into the living world. He saw a creature which, erect, would be better than six feet tall and which would weigh about ninety-five pounds, in a suit of no age or colour, as though made of air and doped like an aeroplane wing with the incrusted excretion of all articulate life’s contact with the passing earth, which ballooned light and impedimentless about a skeleton frame as though suit and wearer both hung from a flapping clothes line; a creature with the leashed, eager loose-jointed air of a half-grown high-bred setter puppy, crouched facing the boy with its hands up too in more profound burlesque than Jiggs’ because it was obviously not intended to be burlesque.