“There it is,” Jiggs said. “Jesus, he better had come in on somebody’s money or we’d a all set up in the depot to-night with our bellies thinking our throats was cut. Come on. I’ll help you put the ‘chutes on.” But the taller man was looking up the apron. Jiggs paused too and saw the boy’s khaki garment riding high above the heads below the bandstand, though he could not actually see the woman. The six aeroplanes which for six minutes had followed one another around the course at one altitude and in almost undeviating order like so many beads on a string, were now scattered about the adjacent sky for a radius of two or three miles as if the last pylon had exploded them like so many scraps of paper, jockeying in to land.
“Who’s that guy?” the taller man said. “Hanging around Laverne?”
“Lazarus?” Jiggs said. “Jesus, if I was him I would be afraid to use myself. I would be even afraid to take myself out of bed, like I was a cut-glass monkey-wrench or something. Come on. Your guy is already warmed up and waiting for you.”
For a moment longer the taller man looked up the apron bleakly. Then he turned. “Go and get the ‘chutes and find somebody to bring the sack; I will meet...”
“They are already at the ship,” Jiggs said. “I done already carried them over. Come on.”
The other, moving, stopped dead still. He looked down at Jiggs with a bleak handsome face whose features were regular, brutally courageous, the expression quick if not particularly intelligent, not particularly strong. Under his eyes the faint smudges of dissipation appeared to have been put there by a makeup expert. He wore a narrow moustache above a mouth much more delicate and even feminine than that of the woman whom he and Jiggs called Laverne. “What?” he said. “You carried the ‘chutes and that sack of flour over to the ship? You did?” Jiggs did not stop. “You’re next, ain’t you? You’re ready to go, ain’t you? And it’s getting late, ain’t it? What are you waiting on? for them to turn on the boundary lights and maybe the floods? or maybe to have the beacon to come in on to land?” The other walked again, following Jiggs along the apron towards where an aeroplane, a commercial type, stood just without the barrier, its engine running. “I guess you have been to the office and collected my twenty-five bucks and saved me some more time too,” he said.
“All right; I’ll attend to that too,” Jiggs said. “Come on, The guy’s burning gas; he’ll be trying to charge you six bucks instead of five if you don’t snap it up.” They went on to where the aeroplane waited, the pilot already in his cockpit, the already low sun, refracted by the invisible propeller blades, shimmering about the nose of it in a faint copper-coloured nimbus. The two parachutes and the sack of flour lay on the ground beside it. Jiggs held them up one at a time while the other backed into the harness, then he stooped and darted about the straps and buckles like a squirrel, still talking. “Yair, he come in on the money. I guess I will get my hooks on a little jack myself to-night. Jesus, I won’t know how to count higher than two bucks.”
“But don’t try to learn again on my twenty-five,” the other said. “Just get it and hold it until I get back.”
“What would I want with your twenty-five?” Jiggs said. “With Roger just won thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five, whatever that is. How do you think twenty-five bucks will look beside that?”
“I can tell you a bigger difference still,” the other said. “The money Roger won ain’t mine but this twenty-five is. Maybe you better not even collect it. I’ll attend to that too.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, busy, bouncing on his short strong legs, snapping the buckles of the emergency parachute. “Yair, we’re jake now. We can eat and sleep again to-night.... O.K.” He stood back and the other waddled stiffly towards the aeroplane. The checker came up with his pad and took their names and the aeroplane’s number and went away.
“Where you want to land?” the pilot said.
“I don’t care,” the jumper said. “Anywhere in the United States except that lake.”
“If you see you’re going to hit the lake,” Jiggs said, “turn around and go back up and jump again.”
They paid no attention to him. They were both looking back and upward towards where in the high drowsy azure there was already a definite alteration towards night. “Should be about dead up there now,” the pilot said. “What say I spot you for the hangar roofs and you can slip either way you want.”
“All right,” the jumper said. “Let’s get away from here.”
With Jiggs shoving at him he climbed on to the wing and into the front cockpit and Jiggs handed up the sack of flour and the jumper took it on to his lap like it was a child. With his bleak humourless handsome face he looked exactly like the comedy young bachelor caught by his girl while holding a strange infant on a street corner. The aeroplane began to move; Jiggs stepped back as the jumper leaned out, shouting: “Leave that money alone, you hear?”
“Okey doke,” Jiggs said. The aeroplane waddled out and on to the runway and turned and stopped; again the bomb, the soft slow bulb of cotton batting flowered against the soft indefinite lake-haze where for a little while still evening seemed to wait before moving in; again the report, the thud and jar twice reverberant against the stands as if the report bounced once before becoming echo. And now Jiggs turned as if he had waited for that signal too and almost parallel he and the aeroplane began to move... the stocky purposeful man, and the machine already changing angle and then lifting, banking in a long climbing turn. It was two thousand feet high when Jiggs shoved past the purple-and-gold guards at the main gate and through the throng huddled in the narrow under-pass beneath the reserved seats. Someone plucked at his sleeve.
“When’s the guy going to jump out of the parachute?”
“Not until he gets back down here,” Jiggs said, butting on past the other purple-and-gold guards and so into the rotunda itself and likewise not into the amplified voice again for the reason that he had never moved out of it:
“... still gaining altitude now; the ship has a long way to go yet. And then you will see a living man, a man like yourselves — a man like half of yourselves and that the other half of yourselves like, I should say — hurl himself into space and fall for almost four miles before pulling the ripcord of the parachute; by ripcord we mean the trigger that—” Once inside, Jiggs paused, looking swiftly about, breasting now with immobility the now comparatively thin tide which still set towards the apron and talking to itself with one another in voices forlorn, baffled, and amazed:
“What is it now? What are they doing out there now?”
“Fella going to jump ten miles out of a parachute.”
“Better hurry too,” Jiggs said. “It may open before he can jump out of it.” The rotunda, filled with dusk, was lighted now, with a soft sourceless wash of no earthly colour or substance and which cast no shadow: spacious, suave, sonorous and monastic, wherein relief or mural-limning or bronze and chromium skilfully shadow-lurked presented the furious, still, and legendary tale of what man has come to call his conquering of the infinite and impervious air. High overhead the dome of azure glass repeated the mosaiced twin F symbols of the runways to the brass twin F’s let into the tile floor and which, bright polished, gleaming, seemed to reflect and find soundless and fading echo in turn monogrammed into the bronze grilling above the ticket-and-information windows and inletted frieze-like into baseboard and cornice of the synthetic stone. “Yair,” Jiggs said. “It must have set them back that million.... Say, mister, where’s the office?” The guard told him; he went to the small discreet door almost hidden in an alcove and entered it and for a time he walked out of the voice though it was waiting for him when, a minute later, he emerged:
“... still gaining altitude. The boys down here can’t tell just how high he is but he looks about right. It might be any time now; you’ll see the flour first and then you will know there is a living man falling at the end of it, a living man falling through space at the rate of four hundred feet a second... When Jiggs reached the apron again (
he too had no ticket and so though he could pass from the apron into the rotunda as often as he pleased, he could not pass from the rotunda to the apron save by going around through the hangar) the aeroplane was no more than a trivial and insignificant blemish against the sky which was now definitely that of evening, seeming to hang there without sound or motion. But Jiggs did not look at it. He thrust on among the up-gazing motionless bodies and reached the barrier just as one of the racers was being wheeled in from the field. He stopped one of the crew; the bill was already in his hand. “Monk, give this to Jackson, will you? For flying that parachute jump. He’ll know.”
He went back into the hangar, walking fast now and already unfastening his coverall before he pushed through the chicken-wire door. He removed the coverall and hung it up and only for a second glanced at his hands. “I’ll wash them when I get to town,” he said. Now the first port lights came on; he crossed the plaza, passing the bloomed bloodless grapes on their cast stalks on the quadrate bases of which four F’s were discernible even in twilight. The bus was lighted too. It had its quota of passengers though they were not inside. Including the driver they stood beside it, looking up, while the voice of the amplifier, apocryphal, sourceless, inhuman, ubiquitous and beyond weariness or fatigue, went on:
“...in position now; it will be any time now.... There. There. There goes the wing down; he has throttled back now now. Now.... There he is, folks; the flour, the flour....” The flour was a faint stain unrolling ribbon-like, light, lazy, against the sky, and then they could see the falling dot at the head of it which, puny, increasing, became the tiny figure of a man plunging without movement towards a single long suspiration of human breath, until at last the parachute bloomed. It unfolded swaying against the accomplished and ineradicable evening; beneath it the jumper oscillated slowly, settling slowly now towards the field. The boundary and obstruction lights were on too now; he floated down as though out of a soundless and breathless void, towards the bright necklace of field lights and the electrified name on each hangar roof. At the moment the green light above the beacon on the signal tower began to wink and flash too: dot-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot, across the nightbound lake. Jiggs touched the driver’s arm.
“Come on, Jack,” he said. “I got to be at Grandlieu Street before six o’clock.”
An Evening in New Valois
THE DOWN-FUNNELLED LIGHT from the desk-lamp struck the reporter across the hips; to the city editor sitting behind the desk the reporter loomed from the hips upward for an incredible distance to where the cadaver face hung against the dusty gloom of the city room’s upper spaces, in a green corpse glare as appropriate as water to fish. He saw the raked disreputable hat, the suit that looked as if someone else had just finished sleeping in it, and with one coat pocket sagging with yellow copy paper and from the other protruding, folded, the cold violent still damp black
ALITY OF
BURNED
... the entire air and appearance of a last and cheerful stage of what old people call galloping consumption. This was the man whom the editor believed (certainly hoped) to be unmarried, though not through any knowledge or report but because of something which the man’s living being emanated — a creature who apparently never had any parents either and who will not be old and never was a child, who apparently sprang full-grown and irrevocably mature out of some violent and instantaneous transition like the stories of dead steamboat men and mules. If it were learned that he had a brother for instance it could create neither warmth nor surprise any more than finding the mate to a discarded shoe in a trashbin. The editor had heard how a girl in a Barricade Street crib said of him that it would be like assessing the invoked spirit at a séance held in a rented restaurant room with a cover-charge.
Upon the desk, in the full target of the lamp’s glare, it lay too: the black bold still damp
FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET PILOT BURNED ALIVE
Beyond it, back-flung, shirt-sleeved, his bald head above the green eyeshade corpse glared too, the city editor looked at the reporter fretfully. “You have an instinct for events,” he said. “If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seam to bring back anything but information. Oh, you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven’t been sued yet and so doubtless it’s all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve. But it’s not the living breath of news. It’s just information. It’s dead before you even get back here with it.” Immobile beyond the lamp’s hard radius the reporter stood, watching the editor with an air leashed, attentive, and alert. “It’s like trying to read something in a foreign language. You know it ought to be there; maybe you know by God it is there. But that’s all. Can it be by some horrible mischance that without knowing it you listen and see in one language and then do what you call writing in another? How does it sound to you when you read it yourself?”
“When I read what?” the reporter said. Then he sat down in the opposite chair while the editor cursed him. He collapsed upon the chair with a loose dry scarecrow-like clatter as though of his own skeleton and the wooden chair’s in contact, and leaned forward across the desk, eager, apparently not only on the verge of the grave itself but in actual sight of the other side of Styx: of the saloons which have never sounded with cash register or till; of that golden District where gleam with frankincense and scented oils the celestial anonymous bosoms of eternal and subsidized delight. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he cried. “Why didn’t you tell me before that this is what you want? Here I have been running my ass ragged eight days a week trying to find something worth telling and then telling it so it won’t make eight thousand different advertisers and subscribers — But no matter now. Because listen.” He jerked off his hat and flung it on to the desk; as quickly the editor snatched it up as if it had been a crust of ant-laden bread on a picnic tablecloth and jerked it back into the reporter’s lap. “Listen,” the reporter said. “She’s out there at the airport. She’s got a little boy, only it’s two of them, that fly those little ships that look like mosquitoes. No: just one of them flies the ship; the other makes the delayed parachute jump — you know, with the fifty-pound sack of flour and coming down like the haunt of Yuletide or something. Yair; they’ve got a little boy, about the size of this telephone, in dungarees like they w — —”
“What?” the editor cried. “Who have a little boy?”
“Yair. They don’t know. — In dungarees like they wear; when I come into the hangar this morning they were clean, maybe because the first day of a meet is the one they call Monday, and he had a stick and he was swabbing grease up off the floor and smearing it on to himself so he would look like they look.... Yair, two of them: this guy Shumann that took second money this afternoon, that come up from fourth in a crate that all the guys out there that are supposed to know said couldn’t even show. She’s his wife, that is her name’s Shumann and the kid’s is Shumann too: out there in the hangar this morning in dungarees like the rest of them, with her hands full of wrenches and machinery and a gob of cotter keys in her mouth like they tell how women used to do with the pins and needles before General Motors begun to make their clothes for them, with this Harlow-coloured hair that they would pay her money for in Hollywood and a smear of grease where she had swiped it back with her wrist. She’s his wife: they have been married almost ever since the kid was born six years ago in a hangar in California. Yair, this day Shumann comes down at whatever town it was in Iowa or Indiana or wherever it was she was a sophomore in the high school back before they had the air mail for farmers to quit ploughing and look up at; in the high school at recess, and so maybe that was why she come out without a hat even and got into the front seat of
one of those Jennies the army used to sell them for cancelled stamps or whatever it was. And maybe she sent a postcard back from the next cow pasture to the aunt or whoever it was that was expecting her to come home to dinner, granted that they have kin-folks or are descended from human beings, and he taught her to jump parachutes. Because they ain’t human like us; they couldn’t turn those pylons like they do if they had human blood and senses and they wouldn’t want to or dare to if they just had human brains. Burn them like this one to-night and they don’t even holler in the fire; crash one and it ain’t even blood when you haul him out: it’s cylinder oil the same as in the crank-case.
“And listen: it’s both of them; this morning I walk into the hangar where they are getting the ships ready and I see the kid and a guy that looks like a little horse squared off with their fists up and the rest of them watching with wrenches and things in their hands and the kid rushes in flailing his arms and the guy holding him off and the others watching and the guy put the kid down and I come up and square off too with my fists up too and I says, ‘Come on, Dempsey. How about taking me on next?’ and the kid don’t move, he just looks at me and then the guy says, ‘Ask him who’s his old man,’ only I thought he said, ‘So’s his old man,’ and I said, ‘So’s his old man?’ and the guy says, ‘No. Who’s his old man,’ and I said it, and here the kid comes with his fists flailing, and if he had just been half as big as he wanted to be right then he would have beat hell out of me. And so I asked them and they told me.” He stopped; he ran out of speech or perhaps out of breath not as a vessel runs empty but with the instantaneous cessation of some weightless wind-driven toy, say a celluloid pinwheel. Behind the desk, still back-flung, clutching the chair arms, the editor glared at him with outraged amazement.
“What?” he cried. “Two men, with one wife and child between them?”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 175
