“Get out of here!” he screamed. “Get out! Out!”
For a moment longer the reporter looked down at him with that startled interrogation, then he turned and retreated. But before he had cleared the railing around the desk Hagood was calling him back in a voice hoarse and restrained. He returned to the desk and watched the editor snatch from a drawer a pad of note forms and scrawl on the top one and thrust pad and pen towards him.
“What’s this, chief?” the reporter said.
“It’s a hundred and eighty dollars,” Hagood said in that tense careful voice, as though speaking to a child. “With interest at six per cent, per annum and payable at sight Not even on demand: on sight. Sign it.”
“Jesus,” the reporter said. “Is it that much already?”
“Sign it,” Hagood said.
“Sure, chief,” the reporter said. “I never did mean to try to beat you out of it.”
But that was eighteen months ago; now Hagood and Jiggs stood side by side on the old uneven flags which the New Valoisians claim rang more than once to the feet of the pirate Lafitte, looking up towards the window and the loud drunken voice beyond it.
“So that’s his name,” Jiggs said. “That what?”
“That nothing!” Hagood said. “It’s his last name. Or the only name he has except the one initial as far as I or anyone else in this town knows. But it must be his; I never heard anyone else named that and so no one intelligent enough to have anything to hide from would deliberately assume it. You see? Anyone, even a child, would know it is false.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Even a kid wouldn’t be fooled by it.” They looked up at the window.
“I know his mother,” Hagood said. “Oh, I know what you are thinking. I thought the same thing myself when I first saw him: what anyone would think if he were to begin to explain where and when and why he came into the world, like what you think about a bug or a worm: ‘All right! All right! For God’s sake, all right!’ And now he has doubtless been trying ever since, I think it was about half-past twelve, to get drunk and I daresay successfully.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “You’re safe there. He’s telling Jack how to fly, about how Matt Ord gave him an hour’s dual once. About how when you take off and land on them concrete Fs out at the airport he says it’s like flying in and out of a — organization maybe. He said organization or organism but maybe he never knew himself what he was trying to say; something about a couple of gnats hanging around a couple of married elephants in bed together like they say it takes them days and days and even weeks to get finished. Yair, him and Jack both, because Laverne and Roger have gone to bed in the bed with the kid and so maybe him and Jack are trying to get boiled enough to sleep on the floor, because Jesus, he spent enough on that taxi to have taken us all to the hotel. But nothing would do but we must come home with him. Yair, he called it a house too; and on the way he rushes into this dive and rushes out with a gallon of something that he is hollering is absinth only I never drank any absinth but I could have made him all he wanted of it with a bath tub and enough grain alcohol and a bottle of paregoric or maybe it’s laudanum. But you can come up and try it yourself. Besides, I better get on back; I am kind of keeping an eye on him and Jack, see?”
“Watching them?” Hagood said.
“Yair. It won’t be no fight though; like I told Jack, it would be like pushing over your grandmother. It happened that Jack kept on seeing him and Laverne this afternoon standing around on the apron or coming out of the—” Hagood turned upon Jiggs-
“Do I,” Hagood cried with thin outrage, “do I have to spend half my life listening to him telling me about you people and the other half listening to you telling me about him?” Jiggs’ mouth was still open. He closed it slowly; he looked at Hagood steadily with his hot bright regard, his hand on his hips, light poised on his bronco legs, leaning a little forward.
“You don’t have to listen to anything I can tell you if you don’t want to, mister,” he said. “You called me down here. I never called you. What is it you want with me or him?”
“Nothing!” Hagood said. “I only came here in the faint hope that he would be in bed, or at least sober enough to come to work to-morrow.”
“He says he don’t work for you. He says you fired him.”
“He lied!” Hagood cried. “I told him to be there at ten o’clock to-morrow morning. That’s what I told him.”
“Is that what you want me to tell him, then?”
“Yes! Not to-night. Don’t try to tell him to-night. Wait until to-morrow, when he...You can do that much for your night’s lodging, can’t you?” Again Jiggs looked at him with that hot steady speculation.
“Yair. I’ll tell him. But it won’t be just because I am trying to pay him back for what he done for us to-night. See what I mean?”
“I apologize,” Hagood said. “But tell him. Do it any way you want to, but just tell him, see that he is told before he leaves to-morrow. Will you?”
“O.K.,” Jiggs said. He watched the other turn and go back down the alley, then he turned too and entered the house, the corridor, and mounted the cramped, dark, treacherous stairs and into the drunken voice again. The parachute jumper sat on an iron cot disguised thinly by another Indian blanket and piled with bright faded pillows about which dust seemed to lurk in a thin nimbus cloud even at the end of the couch which the jumper had not disturbed. The reporter stood beside a slopped table on which the gallon jug sat and a dish-pan containing now mostly dirty ice-water, though a few fragments of the actual ice still floated in it. He was in his shirt sleeves, his collar open and the knot of his tie slipped downward and the ends of the tie darkly wet, as if he had leaned them downward into the dish-pan; against the bright, vivid even though machine-dyed blanket on the wall behind him he resembled some slain curious trophy of a western vacation, half finished by a taxidermist and then forgotten and then salvaged again.
“Who was it?” he said. “Did he look like if you wanted to see him right after supper on Friday night you would have to go around to the church annex where the Boy Scouts are tripping one another up from behind?”
“What?” Jiggs said. “I guess so.” Then he said, “Yair. That’s him.” The reporter looked at him, holding in his hand a glass such as chain-store jam comes in.
“Did you tell him I was married? Did you tell him I got two husbands now?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “How about going to bed?”
“Bed?” the reporter cried. “Bed? When I got a widowed guest in the house and the least thing I can do for him is to get drunk with him because I can’t do anything else because I am in the same fix he is only I am in this fix all the time and not j just to-night?”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Let’s go to bed.” The reporter leaned against the table and with his bright reckless face he watched j Jiggs go to the bags in the corner and take from the stained canvas sack a paper-wrapped parcel and open it and take out a brand-new bootjack; he watched Jiggs sit on one of the chairs and try to remove the right boot; then at the sound he turned and looked with that bright speculation at the parachute jumper completely relaxed on the cot, his long legs crossed and extended, laughing at Jiggs with vicious and humourless steadiness. Jiggs sat on the floor and extended his leg towards the reporter. “Give it a yank,” he said.
“Sure,” the jumper said. “We’ll give it a yank for you.” The reporter had already taken hold of the boot; the jumper struck him aside with a back-handed blow. The reporter staggered back into the wall and watched the jumper, his handsome face tense and savage in the lamplight, his teeth showing beneath the slender moustache, take hold of the boot and then lift his foot suddenly towards Jiggs’ groin before Jiggs could move. The reporter half fell into the jumper, jolting him away so that the jumper’s foot only struck Jiggs’ turned flank.
“Here!” he cried. “You ain’t playing!”
“Playing?” the jumper said. “Sure I’m playing. That’s all I do — like this.” The reporte
r did not see Jiggs rise from the floor at all; he just saw Jiggs in mid-bounce, as though he had risen with no recourse to his legs at all, and Jiggs’ and the jumper’s hands flick and lock as with the other hand Jiggs now hurled the reporter back into the wall.
“Quit it, now,” Jiggs said. “Look at him. What’s the fun in that, huh?” He looked back over his shoulder at the reporter. “Go to bed,” he said. “Go on, now. You got to be at work at ten o’clock. Go on.” The reporter did not move. He leaned back against the wall, his face fixed in a thin grimace of smiling as though glazed. Jiggs sat on the floor again, his right leg extended again, holding it extended between his hands. “Come on,” he said. “Give them a yank.” The reporter took hold of the boot and pulled; abruptly he too was sitting on the floor facing Jiggs, listening to himself laughing. “Hush,” Jiggs said. “Do you want to wake up Roger and Laverne and the kid? Hush now. Hush.”
“Yair,” the reporter whispered. “I’m trying to quit. But I can’t. See? Just listen to me.”
“Sure you can quit,” Jiggs said. “Look. You done already quit. Ain’t you? See now?”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “But maybe it’s just free-wheeling.” He began to laugh again, and then Jiggs was leaning forward, slapping his thigh with the flat of the bootjack until he stopped.
“Now,” Jiggs said. “Pull.” The boot loosened, since it had already been worked at; Jiggs slipped it off. But when the left one came it gave way so suddenly that the reporter went over on his back, though this time he did not laugh; he lay there saying, “It’s O.K. I ain’t going to laugh.” Then he was looking up at Jiggs standing over him in a pair of cotton socks which, like the home-made putties of the morning, consisted of legs and insteps only.
“Get up,” Jiggs said, lifting the reporter.
“All right,” the reporter said. “Just make the room stop.” He began to struggle to stay down, but Jiggs hauled him up and he leaned outward against the arms which held him on his feet, towards the couch, the cot. “Wait till it comes around again,” he cried; then he lunged violently, sprawling on to the cot and then he could feel someone tumbling on to the cot and he struggled again to be free, saying thickly through a sudden, hot, violent, liquid mass in his mouth, “Look out! Look out! I’m on now. Let go!” Then he was free, though he could not move yet. Then he saw Jiggs lying on the floor next the wall, his back to the room and his head pillowed on the canvas sack, and the parachute jumper at the slopped table, pouring from the jug. The reporter got up, unsteadily, though he spoke quite distinctly: “Yair. That’s the old idea. Little drink, hey?” He moved towards the table, walking carefully, his face wearing again the expression of bright and desperate recklessness, speaking apparently in soliloquy to an empty room: “But nobody to drink with now. Jiggs gone to bed and Roger gone to bed and Laverne can’t drink to-night because Roger won’t let her drink. See?” Now he looked at the jumper across the table, above the jug, the jam glasses, the dish-pan, with that bright dissolute desperation though he still seemed to speak into an empty room: “Yair. It was Roger, see. Roger was the one that wouldn’t let her have anything to drink to-night, that took the glass out of her hand after a friend gave it to her. And so she and Roger have gone to bed. See?” They looked at one another.
“Maybe you wanted to go to bed with her yourself?” the jumper said. For a moment longer they looked at one another. The reporter’s face had changed. The bright recklessness was still there, but now it was overlaid with that abject desperation which, lacking anything better, is courage.
“Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” flinging himself backward and crossing his arms before his face at the same time. At first he did not even realize that it was only the floor which had struck him until he lay prone again, his arms above his face and head and looking between them at the feet of the parachute jumper who had not moved. He watched the jumper’s hand go out and strike the lamp from the table and then when the crash died he could see nothing and hear nothing, lying on the floor perfectly and completely passive and waiting. “Jesus,” he said quietly, “for a minute I thought you were trying to knock the jug off.” But there was no reply, and again his insides had set up that fierce maelstrom to which there was no focal point, not even himself. He lay motionless and waiting and felt the quick faint airblast and then the foot, the shoe, striking him hard in the side, once, and then he heard the jumper’s voice from above him speaking apparently from somewhere within the thick instability of the room, the darkness, whirling and whirling away, in a tone of quiet detachment saying the same words and in the same tone in which he had spoken them to Jiggs in the brothel six hours ago. They seemed to continue, to keep on speaking, clapping quietly down at him even after he knew by sound that the jumper had gone to the cot and stretched out on it; he could hear the quiet savage movements as the other arranged the dusty pillows and drew the blanket up.
“That must be at least twelve times,” the reporter thought. “He must have called me a son of a bitch at least eight times after he went to sleep.... Yair,” he thought, “I told you. I’ll go, all right. But you will have to give me time, until I can get up and move.... Yair,” he thought, while the long vertiginous darkness completed a swirl more profound than any yet; now he felt the thick cold oil start and spring from his pores which, when his dead hand found his dead face, did not sop up nor wipe away beneath the hand but merely doubled as though each drop were the atom which instantaneously divides not only into two equal parts but into two parts each of which is equal to the recent whole; “yesterday I talked myself out of a job, but to-night I seem to have talked myself out of my own house.”
But at last he began to see: it was the dim shape of the window abruptly against some outer light-coloured space or air; vision caught, snagged and clung desperately and blindly like the pinafore of a child falling from a fence or a tree. On his hands and knees and still holding to the window by vision he found the table and got to his feet. He remembered exactly where he had put the key, carefully beneath the edge of the lamp, but now with the lamp gone his still nerveless hand did not feel the key at all when he knocked it from the table; it was hearing alone: the forlorn faint clink. He got down and found it at last and rose again, carefully, and wiped the key on the end of his necktie and laid it in the centre of the table, putting it down with infinite care as though it were a dynamite cap, and found one of the sticky glasses and poured from the jug by sound and feel and raised the glass, gulping, while the icy almost pure alcohol channelled fiercely down his chin and seemed to blaze through his cold wet shirt and on to and into his flesh. It tried to come back at once; he groped to the stairs and down them, swallowing and swallowing the vomit which tried to fill his throat.
There was something else that he had intended to do which he remembered only when the door clicked irrevocably behind him and the cold thick pre-dawn breathed against his damp shirt which had no coat to cover it and warm it. And now he could not recall at once what he had intended to do, where he had intended to go, as though destination and purpose were some theoretical point like latitude or time which he had passed in the hall, or something like a stamped and forgotten letter in the coat which he had failed to bring. Then he remembered; he stood on the cold flags, shaking with slow and helpless violence inside his wet shirt, remembering that he had started for the newspaper to spend the rest of the night on the floor of the now empty city room (he had done it before), having for the time forgotten that he was now fired. If he had been sober he would have tried the door, as people will, out of that vague hope for, even though not belief in, miracles. But, drunk, he did not. He just began to move carefully away, steadying himself along the wall until he should get into motion, waiting to begin again to try to keep the vomit swallowed, thinking quietly out of peaceful and profound and detached desolation and amazement: “Four hours ago they were out and I was in, and now it’s turned around exactly backward. It’s like there was a kind of cosmic rule for poverty like there is for water-level, like there
has to be a certain weight of burns on park benches or in railroad waiting-rooms waiting for morning to come or the world will tilt up and spill all of us wild and shrieking and grabbing like so many shooting stars, off into nothing.” But it would have to be a station, walls, even though he had long since surrendered to the shaking and felt no cold at all any more. There were two stations, but he had never walked to either of them and he could not decide nor remember which was the nearer, when he stopped abruptly, remembering the Market, thinking of coffee. “Coffee,” he said. “Coffee. When I have had some coffee, it will be to-morrow. Yair. When you have had coffee, then it is already to-morrow and so you don’t have to wait for it.”
He walked pretty fast now, breathing with his mouth wide open as if he hoped (or were actually doing it) to soothe and quiet his stomach with the damp and dark and the cold.
Now he could see the Market — a broad, low, brilliant, wallless cavern filled with ranked vegetables as bright and impervious in appearance as artificial flowers, among which men in sweaters and women in men’s sweaters and hats too sometimes, with Latin faces still swollen with sleep and vapoured faintly about the mouth and nostrils by breathing still warm from slumber, paused and looked at the man in shirt sleeves and loosened collar, with a face looking more than ever like that of a corpse roused and outraged out of what should have been the irrevocable and final sleep. He went on towards the coffee-stall; he felt fine now. “Yair, I’m all right now,” he thought, because almost at once he had quit trembling and shaking, and when at last the cup of hot pale liquid was set before him he told himself again that he felt fine; indeed, the very fact of his insistence to himself should have been intimation enough that things were not all right. And then he sat perfectly motionless, looking down at the cup in that rapt concern with which one listens to his own insides. “Jesus,” he thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. Maybe I should have walked around a while longer.” But he was here, the coffee waited before him; already the counterman was watching him coldly. “And Jesus, I’m right; after a man has had his coffee it’s to-morrow: it has to be!” he cried, with no sound, with that cunning, self-deluding logic of a child. “And to-morrow it’s just a hang over; you ain’t still drunk to-morrow; to-morrow you can’t feel this bad.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 180
