“Did what?” Jiggs said, already working over towards the wall beside the entrance. “Oh. Teared Q pickles. Yair; of one thousand rented... if you got the jack too. I got the Q pickle all right. I got enough for one thousand. And if I just had the jack too it wouldn’t be teared. How about another cigarette?”
The reporter gave him another one from the crumpled pack. Jiggs now stood against the wall. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Come on in,” the reporter said. “They are bound to be here. It will be after midnight before they even find out that Grandlieu Street has been closed.... That’s a snappy pair of boots you got on there.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He looked down at his right foot again. “At least he wasn’t a football player or maybe driving a truck.
.. I’ll wait here. You can give me a call if Roger wants me.” The reporter went on; Jiggs stood again on his left leg and scrubbed at his right instep with his cap. “What a town,” he thought. “Where you got to wear a street closed sign on your back to walk around in it.”
“Because at least I am a reporter until one minute past ten to-morrow,” the reporter thought, mounting the shallow steps towards the lobby; “he said so himself. I reckon I will have to keep on being one until then. Because even if I am fired now, at this minute while I walk here, there won’t be anybody for him to tell to take my name off the pay roll until noon to-morrow. So I can tell him it was my conscience. I can call him from the hotel here and tell him my conscience would not let me go home and go to sleep.” He recoiled, avoiding here also the paper plumage, the parrot mask, a mixed party, whisky-and-gin reeking, and then gone, leaving behind them the draggled cumulant hillocks of trampled confetti minching across the tile floor before the minching pans and brooms of paid monkey-men who for three nights now will do little else; they vanished, leaving the reporter for the instant marooned beside the same easel-plat with which the town bloomed — the photographs of man and machine each above its neat legend:
MATT ORD, NEW VALOIS. HOLDER, WORLD’S LAND PLANE SPEED RECORD
AL MYERS. CALEXCO
JIMMY OTT. CALEXCO
R. Q. BULLITT. WINNER GRAVES TROPHY, MIAMI, FLA
LIEUT. FRANK BURNHAM
And here also the cryptic shield caught ( i n r i ) loops of bunting giving an appearance temporary and tentlike to interminable long corridors of machine plush and gilded synthetic plaster running between anonymous and rentable spaces or alcoves from sunrise to sunset across America, between the nameless faience woman-face behind the phallic ranks of cigars and the stuffed chairs sentinelled each by its spittoon and potted palm; — the congruous stripe of Turkey red beneath the recent-gleamed and homeless shoes running on into an interval of implacable circumspection: a silent and discreet inference of lysol and a bath — billboard stage and vehicle for what in the old lusty days called themselves drummers: among the brass spittoons of elegance and the potted palms of decorum, legion homeless and symbolic: the immemorial flying buttresses of ten million American Saturday nights, with shrewd heads filled with to-morrow’s cosmic alterations in the form of price lists and the telephone numbers of discontented wives and high-school girls. “Until time to take the elevator up and telephone the bellhop for gals,” the reporter thought.
But the lobby to-night was crowded with more than these; already he saw them fallen definitely into two distinct categories: the one in Madison Avenue jackets, who perhaps once held transport ratings and perhaps still holds them, like the manufacturer who once wrote himself mechanic or clerk retains in the new chromium Geddes sanctuary the ancient primary die or mimeograph machine with which he started out, and perhaps have now only the modest Q.B. wings which clip to the odorous lapel the temperate silk ribbon stencilled Judge or Official, without the transport rating and perhaps the ribbon and the tweed but not even the wings; and the other with faces both sober and silent because they cannot drink to-night and fly to-morrow and have never learned to talk at any time, in blue serge cut apparently not only from the same bolt but folded at the same crease on the same shelf, who hold the severe transport rating and are here to-night by virtue of painfully drummed charter trips from a hundred little nameless bases known only to the Federal Department of Commerce, and whose equipment consists of themselves and a mechanic and one aeroplane which is not new. The reporter thrust on among them, with that semblance of filtering rather than passing. “Yair,” he thought, “you don’t need to look. It’s the smell, you can tell the bastards because they smell like pressing clubs instead of Harris tweed.” Then he saw her, standing beside a Spanish jar filled with sand pocked by chewing gum and cigarettes and burnt matches, in a brown worn hat and a stained trench-coat from whose pocket protruded a folded newspaper. “Yah,” he thought, “because a trench-coat will fit anybody and so they can have two of them and then somebody can always stay at home with the kid.” When he approached her she looked full at him for a moment, with pale blank complete unrecognition, so that while he crossed the crowded lobby towards her and during the subsequent three hours while at first he and she and Shumann and Jiggs, and later the little boy and the parachute jumper too, sat crowded in the taxicab while he watched the implacable meter figures compound, he seemed to walk solitary and chill and without progress down a steel corridor like a fly in a gun barrel, thinking, “Yah, Hagood told me to go home and I never did know whether I intended to go or not. But Jiggs told me she would be at the hotel, but I didn’t believe that at all”; thinking (while the irrevocable figures clocked and clicked beneath the dim insistent bulb and the child slept on his bony lap and the other four smoked the cigarette which he had bought for them and the cab spun along the dark swamp-smelling shell road out to the airport and then back to town again) — thinking how he had not expected to see her again because to-morrow and to-morrow do not count because that will be at the field, with air and earth full of snarling and they not even alive out there because they are not human. But not like this, in clad decorous attitudes that the police will not even look once at, in the human night world of half-past ten o’clock and then eleven and then twelve: and then behind a million separate secret closed doors we will slack ourselves profoundly defenceless on our backs, opened for the profound unsleeping, the inescapable and compelling flesh. Standing there beside the Basque chamber pot at twenty-two minutes past ten because one of her husbands flew this afternoon in a crate that three years ago was all right, that three years ago was so all right that ever since all the others have had to conjoin as one in order to keep it so that the word ‘race’ would still apply, so that now they cannot quit because if they once slow down they will be overreached and destroyed by their own spawning, like the Bornean what’s-its-name that has to spawn running to keep from being devoured by its own litter. “Yah,” he thought, “standing there waiting so he can circulate in his blue serge suit and the other trench-coat among the whisky and the tweed when he ought to be at what they call home in bed except they ain’t human and don’t have to sleep”; thinking how it seems that he can bear either of them, either one of them alone. “Yair,” he thought, “tiered Q pickles of one thousand... nights. They will have to hurry before anybody can go to bed with her,” walking straight into the pale cold blank gaze which waked only when he reached his hand and drew the folded paper from the trench-coat’s pocket.
“Dempsey asleep, huh?” he said, opening the paper, the page which he could have recited off-hand before he even looked at it:
BURNHAM BURNS
VALOISIAN CLAIMS LOVENEST FRAMEUP
Myers Easy Winner in Opener at Feinman Airport
Laughing Boy in Fifth at Washington Park
“No news is good newspaper news,” he said, folding the paper again. “Dempsey in bed, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Keep it. I’ve seen it.” Perhaps it was his face. “Oh, I remember. You work on a paper yourself. Is it this one? or did you tell me?”
“Yair,” he said. “I told you. No, it ain’t this one.” Then he turned too,
though she had already spoken.
“This is the one that bought Jack the ice-cream to-day,” she said. Shumann wore the blue serge, but there was no trench-coat. He wore a new grey homburg hat, not raked like in the department store cuts but set square on the back of his head so that (not tall, with blue eyes in a square thin profoundly sober face) he looked out not from beneath it but from within it with open and fatal humourlessness, like an early Briton who has been assured that the Roman governor will not receive him unless he wear the borrowed centurion’s helmet. He looked at the reporter for a single unwinking moment even blanker than the woman’s had been.
“Nice race you flew in there to-day,” the reporter said.
“Yair?” Shumann said. Then he looked at the woman. The reporter looked at her too. She had not moved, yet she now stood in a more complete and somehow terrific immobility, in the stained trench-coat, a cigarette burning in the grained and black-rimmed fingers of one hand, looking at Shumann with naked and urgent concentration. “Come on,” Shumann said. “Let’s go.” But she did not move.
“You didn’t get it,” she said. “You couldn’t—”
“No. They don’t pay off until Saturday night,” Shumann said. (“Yah,” the reporter thought, clashing the tight hermetic door behind him as the automatic dome light came on; “ranked coffin cubicles of dead tail; the Great American in one billion printings slave post-chained and scribble-scrawled: annotations of eternal electro deitch and bottom hope.”)
“Deposit five cents for three minutes, please,” the bland machine voice chanted. The metal stalk sweat-clutched, the gutta-percha bloom cupping his breathing back at him, he listened, fumbled, counting as the discreet click and cling died into wire hum.
“That’s five,” he bawled. “Hear them? Five nickels. Now don’t cut me off in three hundred and eighty-one seconds and tell me to... Hello,” he bawled, crouching, clutching the metal stalk as if he hung by it from the edge of a swimming pool; “listen. Get this.... Yair. At the Terrebonne.... Yair, after midnight; I know. Listen. Chance for the goddamn paper to do something at last beside run our ass ragged between what Grandlieu Street kikes tell us to print in their half of the paper and tell you what you can’t print in our half and still find something to fill the blank spaces under Connotator of theWorld’s Doings and Moulder of the Peoples’ Thought, ha ha ha ha...
“What?” the editor cried. “Terrebonne Hotel? I told you when you left here three hours ago to—”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Almost three hours, that’s all. Just a taxi ride to get to the other side of Grandlieu Street first, and then out to the airport and back because they don’t have but a hundred beds for visiting pilots out there and General Behind-man needs all of them for his reception. And so we come on back to the hotel because this is where they all are to tell him to come back Saturday night provided the bastard don’t kill him to-morrow or Saturday. And you can thank whatever tutelary ass scratcher you consider presides over the fate destiny and blunders of that office that me or somebody happened to come in here despite the fact that this is the logical place to find what we laughingly call news at ten o’clock at night, what with half the air-meet proprietors getting drunk here and all of Mardi Gras already drunk here. And him that ought to been in bed three hours ago because he’s got to race again to-morrow only he can’t race to-morrow because he can’t go to bed yet because he hasn’t got any money to hire a place with a floor in it because he only won thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five dollars this afternoon, and to the guys that own an air meet that ain’t no more than a borrowed umbrella and the parachute guy can’t do them any good now because Jiggs collected his twenty bucks and—”
“What? What? Are you drunk?”
“No. Listen. Just stop talking a minute and listen. When I saw her out at the airport to-day they were all fixed up for the night like I tried to tell you, but you said it was not news; yair, like you said, whether a man sleeps or not or why he can’t sleep ain’t news but only what he does while he ain’t asleep, provided of course that what he does is what the guys that are ordained to pick and choose it consider news. Yair, I tried to tell you, but I’m just a poor bastard of an ambulance chaser: I ain’t supposed to know news when I see it at thirty-five bucks a week or I’d be getting more.... Where was I? O yair — Had a room for to-night because they have been here since Wednesday and so they must have had somewhere that they could lock the door and take off some of their clothes or at least put the trench-coat down and lay down themselves, because they had shaved somewhere: Jiggs has got a slash on his jaw that even at a barber college you don’t get one like it. So they were all fixed up, only I never asked them what hotel, because I knew it would not have a name, just a sign on the gallery post that the old man made on Saturday when his sciatica felt good enough for him to go down town only she wouldn’t let him leave until he made the sign and nailed it up: and so what was the use in me having to say, ‘What street did you say? Where is that?’ because I ain’t a racing pilot, I am a reporter ha ha ha and so I would not know where these places are. Yair, all fixed up, and so he come in on the money this afternoon and I was standing there holding the kid and she says, ‘There,’ just like that: ‘There.’ And then I know that she has not moved during the whole six and a half minutes or maybe six and forty-nine-fifty-two ten thousandths or whatever the time was; she just says ‘There,’ like that, and so it was O.K. even when he come in from the field with the ship and we couldn’t find Jiggs to help roll the ship into the hangar, and he just says, ‘Chasing a skirt, I guess,’ and we put the ship away and he went to the office to get his one-O-seven-fifty and we stayed there waiting for the parachute guy to come down, and he did and wiped the flour out of his eyes and says, ‘Where’s Jiggs?’
‘Why?’ she says. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘He went to collect my money,’ and she says, ‘My God—’”
“Listen! Listen to me!” the editor cried. “Listen!”
“Yair, the mechanic. In a pair of britches that must have zippers so he can take them off at night like you would peel two bananas, and the tops of a pair of boots riveted under the insteps of a pair of tennis shoes. He collected the parachute guy’s twenty-five bucks for him while the parachute guy was still on the way back from work because the parachute guy gets twenty-five berries for the few seconds it takes except for the five bucks he has to pay the transport pilot to take him to the office you might say, and the eight cents a pound for the flour only to-day the flour was already paid for and so the whole twenty bucks was velvet. And Jiggs collected it and beat it because they owed him some jack and he thought that since Shumann had won the race that he would win the actual money too like the programme said and not only be able to pay last night’s bill at the whore house where they—”
“Will you listen to me? Will you? Will you?”
“Yair; sure. I’m listening. So I come on to Grandlieu Street thinking about how you had told me to go home and wr — go home, and wondering how in hell you expected me to get across Grandlieu between then and midnight, and all of a sudden I hear this excitement and cursing and it is Jiggs where some guy has stepped on his foot and put a scratch on one of them new boots, only I don’t get it then. He just tells me he saw her and Shumann going into the Terrebonne because that was all he knew himself; I don’t reckon he stayed to hear much when he beat it back to town with the parachute guy’s jack and bought the boots and then walked in them to where they had just got in from the field and Shumann had tried to collect his one-O- seven-fifty but they wouldn’t pay him. So I couldn’t cross Grandlieu and so we walked on to the Terrebonne even though this is the last place in town a reporter’s got any business being half-past ten at night, what with all the air meet getting drunk here, and half of Mardi Gras already — but never mind; I already told you that. So we come on over and Jiggs won’t come in and still I don’t get it, even though I had noticed the boots. So I come in and there she is, standing by this greaser chamber pot and the lob
by full of drunk guys with ribbon badges and these kind of coats that look like they need a shave bad, and the guys all congratulating one another about how the airport cost a million dollars and how maybe in the three days more they could find out how to spend another million and make it balance. And he come up, Shumann come up, and her stiller than the pot even and looking at him, and he says they don’t pay off until Saturday and she says, ‘Did you try? Did you try?’ Yair, trying to collect an instalment on the hundred and seven bucks so they can go to bed, with the kid already asleep on the sofa in the madam’s room and the parachute guy waiting with him if he happened to wake up. And so they walked up to the hotel from Amboise Street because it ain’t far, they are both inside the city limits, to collect something on the money he was under the delusion he had won and I said ‘Amboise Street?’ because in the afternoon she just said they had a room down in French town and she said ‘Amboise Street’ looking at me without batting an eye, and if you don’t know what kind of bedding houses they have on Amboise Street your son or somebody ought to tell you: yair, you rent the bed and the two towels and furnish your own cover. So they went to Amboise Street and got a room; they always do that because in the Amboise Streets you can sleep to-night and pay to-morrow because a whore will leave a kid sleep on credit. Only they hadn’t paid for last night yet and so to-night they don’t want to take up the bed again for nothing, what with the air meet in town, let alone the natural course of Mardi Gras. So they left the kid asleep on the madam’s sofa and they come on to the hotel and Shumann said they don’t pay off until Saturday and I said ‘Never mind; I got Jiggs outside’ and they never even looked at me. Because I hadn’t got it then, that Jiggs had spent the money, you see: and so we went out to the taxi and Jiggs was still standing there against the wall and Shumann looked at him and says ‘You can come on too. If I could eat them I would have done it at dinner time’ and Jiggs comes and gets in too, kind of sidling over and then ducking into the cab like it was a hen house and hunkering down on the little seat with his feet under him and I still don’t get it even yet, not even when Shumann says to him ‘You better find a manhole to stand in until Jack gets into the cab.’ So we got in and Shumann says ‘We can walk’ and I says ‘Where? Out to Lanier Avenue to get across Grandlieu?’ and so that was the first dollar-eighty and we eased up as soon as the door got unclogged a little; yair, they were having a rush; and we went in and there the kid was, awake now and eating a sandwich the madam had sent out for, and the madam and a little young whore and the whore’s fat guy in his shirt sleeves and his galluses down, playing with the kid and the fat guy wanting to buy the kid a beer and the kid setting there and telling them how his old man flew the best pylon in America and Jiggs hanging back in the hall and jerking at my elbow until I could hear what he was whispering: ‘Say, listen. Find my bag and open it and you will find a pair of tennis shoes and a paper package that feels like it’s got a... a... well, a bootjack in it and hand them out to me, will you?’ and I says ‘What? A what in it?’ and then the parachute guy in the room says ‘Who’s that out there? Jiggs?’ and nobody answered and the parachute guy says ‘Come in here’ and Jiggs kind of edged into the door where the parachute guy could just see his face and the guy says ‘Come on’ and Jiggs edges a little further in and the guy says ‘Come on’ and Jiggs edges into the light then, with his chin between his shirt pockets and his head turned to one side and the guy looking him slow from feet to his head and then back again and says ‘The son of a bitch’ and the madam says ‘I think so myself. The idea of them dirty bastard kikes holding him up on a purchase of that size for just forty cents’ and the parachute guy says ‘Forty cents?’ Yair, it was like this. The boots was twenty-two-fifty. Jiggs paid down two dollars and a dime on them and he had to pay the parachute guy’s pilot five bucks and so he never had but twenty bucks left even when he beat the bus, and so he borrowed the forty cents from the madam; yair, he left the airport at five-thirty and did all that before the store closed at six; he got there just in time to stick one of the tennis shoes into the door before it shut. So we paid the madam and that was the next five-forty because the room for last night she just charged them three bucks for because they set in her room so she could use the other one for business until midnight when the rush slacked up and so she just charged them three bucks just to use the room to sleep in and the other two bucks was bus fare. And we had the kid and the parachute guy too now, but the driver said it would be O.K. because it would be a long haul out to the airport. The programme said there was accommodations for a hundred visiting pilots out there and if there was more than two or three missing from the lobby of the Terrebonne it was because they was just lost and hadn’t come in yet, and besides you had told me you would fire me if I wasn’t out there at daylight to-morrow morning...no; to-day now... and it was eleven then, almost to-morrow then, and besides it would save the paper the cab fare for me back to town. Yair, that’s how I figured too because it seems like I ain’t used to air meets either and so we took all the baggage, both of them and Jiggs’ meal sack too, and went out there and that was the next two dollars and thirty-five cents, only the kid was asleep again by that time and so maybe one of the dollars was Pullman extra fare. And there was a big crowd still there, standing around and looking at the air where this guy Burnham had flew in it and at the scorched hole in the field where he had flew in that too, and we couldn’t stay out there because they only got beds for a hundred visiting pilots and Colonel Feinman is using all of them for his reception. Yair, reception. You build the airport and you get some receptive women and some booze and you lock the entrances and the information and ticket windows and if they don’t put any money into the tops of their stockings, it’s a reception. So they can’t sleep out there and so we come on back to town and that’s that next two dollars and sixty-five cents because we left the first cab go and we had to telephone for another one and the telephone was a dime and the extra twenty cents was because we didn’t stop at Amboise Street, we come on to the hotel because they are still here and he can still ask them for his jack, still believing the air racing is a kind of sports or something run by men that have got time to stop at almost one o’clock in the morning and count up what thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five dollars is and give it to him for no other reason than that they told him they would if he would do something first. And so now is the chance for this connotator of the world’s doings and moulder of the people’s thought to..
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 177
