Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Come on, Dempsey,” the man said. “How about taking me on for an ice-cream cone? Hey?” The boy did not move. He was not more than six, yet he looked at the apparition before him with the amazed quiet immobility of the grown men. “How about it, huh?” the man said.

  Still the boy did not move. “Ask him who’s his old man,” Jiggs said.

  The man looked at Jiggs. “So’s his old man?”

  “No. Who’s his old man.”

  Now it was the apparition who looked at Jiggs in a kind of shocked immobility. “Who’s his old man?” he repeated. He was still looking at Jiggs when the boy rushed upon him with his fists flailing again and his small face grimly and soberly homicidal. The man was still stooping, looking at Jiggs; it seemed to Jiggs and the other men that the boy’s fists made a light wooden-sounding tattoo as though the man’s skin and the suit too hung on a chair while the man ducked and dodged, trying to guard his face while still glaring at Jiggs with that skull-like amazement, repeating, “Who’s his old man? Who’s his old man?”

  When Jiggs at last reached the unbonneted aeroplane the two men had the super-charger already off and dismantled. “Been to your grandmother’s funeral or something?” the taller one said.

  “I been over there playing with Jack,” Jiggs said. “You just never saw me because there ain’t any women around here to be looking at yet.”

  “Yair?” the other said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Where’s that crescent wrench we bought in Kansas City?” The woman had it in her hand; she gave it to him and drew the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a smudge of grease up and into the meal-coloured, the strong pallid Iowa-com-coloured hair. So he was busy then, though he looked back once and saw the apparition with the boy now riding on his shoulder, leaning into the heads and greasy backs busy again about the other aeroplane, and when he and Shumann lifted the super-charger back on to the engine he looked again and saw them, the boy still riding on the man’s shoulder, going out the hangar door and towards the apron. Then they put the cowling back on and Shumann set the propeller horizontal and Jiggs raised the aeroplane’s tail, easily, already swinging it to pass through the door, the woman stepping back to let the wing pass her, looking back herself into the hangar now.

  “Where did Jack go?” she said.

  “Out towards the apron,” Jiggs said. “With that guy.”

  “With what guy?”

  “Tall guy. Says he is a reporter. That looks like they locked the graveyard up before he got in last night.” The aeroplane passed her, swinging again into the thin sunshine, the tail high and apparently without weight on Jiggs’ shoulder, his thick legs beneath it moving with tense stout piston-like thrusts, Shumann and the taller man pushing the wings.

  “Wait a minute,” the woman said. But they did not pause and she overtook and passed the moving tail group and reached down past the uptilted cockpit hatch and stepped clear, holding a bundle wrapped tightly in a dark sweater. The aeroplane went on; already the guards in the purple-and-gold porter caps were lowering the barrier cable on to the apron; and now the band had begun to play, heard twice: once the faint light almost airy thump-thump-thump from where the sun glinted on the actual horn mouths on the platform facing the reserved section of the stands, and once where the disembodied noise blared brazen, metallic, and loud from the amplifier which faced the barrier. She turned and re-entered the hangar, stepping aside to let another aeroplane and its crew pass; she spoke to one of the men: “Who was that Jack went out with, Art?”

  “The skeleton?” the man said. “They went to get an icecream cone. He says he is a reporter.” She went on, across the hangar and through the chicken-wire door and into the tool room with its row of hooks from which depended the coats and shirts and now one stiff linen collar and tie such as might be seen on a barber-shop hook where a preacher was being shaved and which she recognized as belonging to the circuit-rider-looking man in steel spectacles who won the Graves Trophy race at Miami two months ago. There was neither lock nor hook on this door, and the other, the one through which Jiggs had entered, hung perfectly blank too save for the grease-prints of hands. For less than a second she stood perfectly still, looking at the second door while her hand made a single quick stroking movement about the doorjamb where hook or lock would have been. It was less than a second, then she went on to the corner where the lavatory was — the grease-streaked bowl, the cake of what looked like lava, the metal case for paper towels — and laid the bundle carefully on the floor next the wall where the floor was cleanest, and rose and looked at the door again for a pause that was less than a second — a woman not tall and not thin, looking almost like a man in the greasy coverall, with the pale strong rough ragged hair actually darker where it was sunburned, a tanned heavy-jawed face in which the eyes looked like pieces of china. It was hardly a pause; she rolled her sleeves back, shaking the folds free and loose, and opened the coverall at the throat and freed it about her shoulders too like she had the sleeves, obviously and apparently arranging it so she would not need to touch the foul garment any more than necessary. Then she scrubbed face neck and forearms with the harsh soap and rinsed and dried herself and, stooping, keeping her arms well away from the coverall, she opened the rolled sweater on the floor. It contained a comb, a cheap metal vanity and a pair of stockings rolled in turn into a man’s clean white shirt and a worn wool skirt. She used the comb and the vanity’s mirror, stopping to scrub again at the grease-smudge on her forehead. Then she unbuttoned the shirt and shook out the skirt and spread paper towels on the lavatory and laid the garments on them, openings upward and facing her and, holding the open edges of the coverall’s front between two more paper towels, she paused and looked again at the door: a single still cold glance empty of either hesitation, concern, or regret while even here the faint beat of the band came in mute thuds and blares. Then she turned her back slightly towards the door and in the same motion with which she reached for the skirt she stepped out of the coverall in a pair of brown walking shoes, not new now and which had not cost very much when they had been, and a man’s thin cotton undershorts and nothing else.

  Now the first starting bomb went... a jarring thud followed by a vicious light repercussion as if the bomb had set off another smaller one in the now empty hangar and in the rotunda too. Within the domed steel vacuum the single report became myriad, high and everywhere about the concave ceiling like invisible unearthly winged creatures of that yet unvisioned tomorrow, mechanical instead of blood, bone and meat, speaking to one another in vicious high-pitched ejaculations as though concerting an attack on something below. There was an amplifier in the rotunda too and through it the sound of the aeroplanes turning the field pylon on each lap filled the rotunda and the restaurant where the woman and the reporter sat while the little boy finished the second dish of ice-cream. The amplifier filled rotunda and restaurant even above the sound of feet as the crowd moiled and milled and trickled through the gates on to the field, with the announcer’s voice harsh masculine and disembodied. At the end of each lap would come the mounting and then fading snarl and snore of engines as the aeroplanes came up and zoomed and banked away, leaving once more the scuffle and murmur of feet on tile and the voice of the announcer reverberant and sonorous within the domed shell of glass and steel in a running commentary to which apparently none listened, as if the voice were merely some unavoidable and inexplicable phenomenon of nature like the sound of wind or of erosion. Then the band would begin to play again, though faint and almost trivial behind and below the voice, as if the voice actually were that natural phenomenon against which all man-made sounds and noises blew and vanished like leaves. Then the bomb again, the faint fierce thwack-thwack-thwack, and the sound of engines again trivial and meaningless as the band, as though like the band mere insignificant properties which the voice used for emphasis as the magician uses his wand or handkerchief:

  “... ending the second event, the two hundred cubic inch class dash, the correct tim
e of the winner of which will be given you as soon as the judges report. Meanwhile while we are waiting for it to come in I will run briefly over the afternoon’s programme of events for the benefit of those who have come in late or have not purchased a programme which, by the way, may be purchased for twenty-five cents from any of the attendants in the purple-and-gold Mardi Gras caps....”

  “I got one here,” the reporter said. He produced it, along with a mass of blank yellow copy and a folded newspaper of the morning, from the same pocket of his disreputable coat... a pamphlet already opened and creased back upon the faint mimeographed letters of the first page:

  THURSDAY (DEDICATION DAY)

  2.30 p m. Spot Parachute Jump. Purse $25.00.

  3.00 p m. 200 cu in. Dash. Qualifying Speed 100 in p h. Purse $150.00 (1) 45%. (2) 30%. (3) 15%. (4) 10%.

  3.30 p m. Aerial Acrobatics. Jules Despleins, France. Lieut.

  Frank Burnham, United States.

  4.30 p m. Scull Dash. 375 cu in. Qualifying Speed 160 in p h.

  (1, 2, 3,4).

  5.00 p m. Delayed Parachute Drop.

  8.00 p m. Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane

  Lieut. Frank Burnham.

  “Keep it,” the reporter said. “I don’t need it.”

  “Thanks,” the woman said. “I know the setup.” She looked at the boy. “Hurry and finish it,” she said. “You have already eaten more than you can hold.” The reporter looked at the boy too, with that expression leashed, eager, cadaverous; sitting forward on the flimsy chair in that attitude at once inert yet precarious and light-poised as though for violent and complete departure like a scarecrow in a winter field. “All I can do for him is buy him something to eat,” he said. “To take him to see an air race would be like taking a colt out to Washington Park for the day. You are from Iowa and Shumann was born in Ohio and he was born in California and he has been across the United States four times, let alone Canada and Mexico. Jesus. He could take me and show me, couldn’t he?” But the woman was looking at the boy; she did not seem to have heard at all.

  “Go on,” she said. “Finish it or leave it.”

  “And then we’ll eat some candy,” the reporter said. “Hey, Dempsey?”

  “No,” the woman said. “He’s had enough.”

  “But maybe for later?” the reporter said. She looked at him now: the pale stare without curiosity, perfectly grave, perfectly blank, as he rose, moved, dry loose weightless and sudden and longer than a lath, the disreputable suit ballooning even in this windless conditioned air as he went towards the candy counter. Above the shuffle and murmur of feet in the lobby and above the clash and clatter of crockery in the restaurant the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself, talking of creatures imbued with motion though not with life and incomprehensible to the puny crawling pain-webbed globe, incapable of suffering, wombed and born complete and instantaneous, cunning, intricate and deadly, from out some blind iron bat-cave of the earth’s prime foundation:

  “... dedication meet, Feinman million-dollar airport, New Valois, Franciana, held under the official auspices of the American Aeronautical Association. And here is the official clocking of the winners of the two hundred cubic inch race which you just witnessed... Now they had to breast the slow current; the gatemen (these wore tunics of purple-and-gold as well as caps) would not let them pass because the woman and the child had no tickets. So they had to go back and out and around through the hangar to reach the apron. And here the voice met them again... or rather it had never ceased; they had merely walked in it without hearing or feeling it like in the sunshine; the voice too almost as sourceless as light. Now, on the apron, the third bomb went off, and looking up the apron from where he stood among the other mechanics about the aeroplanes waiting for the next race, Jiggs saw the three of them... the woman in an attitude of inattentive hearing without listening, the scarecrow man who even from here Jiggs could discern to be talking steadily and even now and then gesticulating, the small khaki spot of the little boy’s dungarees riding high on his shoulder and the small hand holding a scarce-tasted chocolate bar in a kind of static surfeit. They went on, though Jiggs saw them twice more, the second time the shadow of the man’s and the little boy’s heads falling for an incredible distance eastward along the apron. Then the taller man began to beckon him and already the five aeroplanes entered for the race were moving, the tails high on the shoulders of their crews, out towards the starting-line.

  When he and the taller man returned to the apron the band was still playing. Faced by the bright stands with their whipping skyline of purple-and-gold pennons the amplifiers at regular intervals along the apron edge erupted snatched blares of ghostlike and ubiquitous sound which, as Jiggs and the other passed them, died each into the next without loss of beat or particular gain in sense or tune. Beyond the amplifiers and the apron lay the flat triangle of reclaimed and tortured earth dragged with slow mechanical violence into air and alternations of light — the ceaseless surface of the outraged lake notched by the oyster-and-shrimp-fossil bed, upon which the immaculate concrete runways lay in the attitude of two stiffly embracing capital F’s, and on one of which the six aeroplanes rested like six motionless wasps, the slanting sun glinting on their soft bright paint and on the faint propeller blurs. Now the band ceased; the bomb bloomed again on the pale sky and had already begun to fade even before the jarring thud, the thin vicious crack of reverberation; and now the voice again, amplified and ubiquitous, louder even than the spatter and snarl of the engines as the six aeroplanes rose raggedly and dissolved, converging, coveying, towards the scattering pylon out in the lake:

  . fourth event, Scull Speed Dash, three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch, twenty-five miles, five times around, purse three hundred and twenty-five dollars. I’ll give you the names of the contestants as the boys, the other pilots on the apron here, figure they will come in. First and second will be Al Myers and Bob Bullitt, in number thirty-two and number five. You can take your choice, your guess is as good as ours; they are both good pilots — Bullitt won the Graves Trophy against a hot field in Miami in December — and they are both flying Chance Specials. It will be the pilot, and I’m not going to make anybody mad by making a guess. — Vas you dere, Sharlie? I mean Mrs. Bullitt. The other boys are good too, but Myers and Bullitt have the ships. So I’ll say third will be Jimmy Ott, and Roger Shumann and Joe Grant last, because as I said, the other boys have the ships. — There they are, coming in from the scattering pylon, and it’s — Yes, it’s Myers or Bullitt out front and Ott close behind, and Shumann and Grant pretty well back. And here they are coming in for the first pylon.”

  The voice was firm, pleasant, assured; it had an American reputation for announcing air meets as other voices had for football or music or prize-fights. A pilot himself, the announcer stood hip high among the caps and horns of the bandstand below the reserved seats, bareheaded, in a tweed jacket even a little over-smart, reminiscent a trifle more of Hollywood Avenue than of Madison, with the modest winged badge of a good solid pilots’ fraternity in the lapel and turned a little to face the box seats while he spoke into the microphone as the aeroplanes roared up and banked around the field pylon and faded again in irregular order.

  “There’s Feinman,” Jiggs said. “In the yellow-and-blue pulpit. The one in the grey suit and the flower. The one with the women. Yair; he’d make lard, now.”

  “Yes,” the taller man said. “Look yonder. Roger is going to take that guy on this next pylon.” Although Jiggs did not look at once, the voice did, almost before the taller man spoke, as if it possessed some quality of omniscience beyond even vision: “Well, well, folks, here’s a race that wasn’t advertised. It looks like Roger Shumann is going to try to upset the boys’ dope. That’s him that went up into third place on that pylon then; he has just taken Ott on the lake pylon. Let’s watch him now; Mrs. Shumann’s here in the crowd somewhere: maybe she knows what R
oger’s got up his sleeve to-day. A poor fourth on the first pylon and now coming in third on the third lap — oh, oh, oh, look at him take that pylon! If we were all back on the farm now I would say somebody has put a cockleburr under Roger’s — well, you know where: maybe it was Mrs. Shumann did it. Good boy, Roger! If you can just hold Ott now because Ott’s got the ship on him, folks; I wouldn’t try to fool you about that. — No; wait, w-a-i-t. — Folks, he’s trying to catch Bullitt; oh, oh, did he take that pylon, folks, he gained three hundred feet on Bullitt on that turn. — Watch now, he’s going to try to take Bullitt on the next pylon — there, there, there — watch him, WATCH him. He’s beating them on the pylons, folks, because he knows that on the straightaway he hasn’t got a chance; oh, oh, oh, watch him now, up there from fourth place in four and a half laps and now he is going to pass Bullitt unless he pulls his wings off on this next. — Here they come in now; oh, oh, oh, Mrs. Shumann’s somewhere in the crowd here; maybe she told Roger if he don’t come in on the money he needn’t come in at all. — There it is, folks; here it is: Myers gets the flag and now it’s Shumann or Bullitt, Shumann or — It’s Schumann, folks, in as pretty a flown race as you ever watched—”