“Go on,” the jumper said. “See what he’s got or get away and let me do it.”
“Wait,” Jiggs said. “Let’s find some way to get him back into the house first.” He leaned across them and tried the door again. He could even see the key now, still on the table beside the jug — an object trivial in size, that a man could almost swallow without it hurting him much probably and which now, even more than the jug, symbolized taunting and fierce regret since it postulated frustration not in miles but in inches; the gambit itself had refused, confounding him and leaving him hung up on a son of a bitch who couldn’t even get into his own house.
“Come on,” the jumper said to Shumann. “See what he’s got — unless somebody has already beat us to him.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, putting his hand on the reporter’s flank. “But if we could just find some way to get him back into the house—” The jumper caught him by the shoulder and jerked him backwards; again Jiggs caught balance, bouncing back, and saw the woman catch the jumper’s arm as the jumper reached toward’s the reporter’s pocket.
“Get away yourself,” she said. The jumper rose; he and the woman glared at one another — the one cold, hard, calm; the other tense, furious, restrained. Shumann had risen too; Jiggs looked quietly and intently from him to the others and back again.
“So you’re going to do it yourself,” the jumper said.
“Yes. I’m going to do it myself.” They stared at one another for an instant longer, then they began to curse each other in short, hard, staccato syllables that sounded like slaps while Jiggs, his hands on his hips and leaning a little forward on his light-poised rubber soles, looked from them to Shumann and back again.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That’ll do now.” He stepped between them, shoving the jumper a little. Then the woman stooped and while Jiggs turned the reporter’s inert body from thigh to thigh she took from his pockets a few crumpled bills and a handful of silver.
“There’s a five and four ones,” Jiggs said. “Let me count that change.”
“Three will pay the bus,” Shumann said. “Just take three more.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Seven or eight will be plenty. Look. Leave him the five and one of the ones for change.” He took the five and one of the ones from the woman’s hand, folded them and thrust them into the reporter’s fob pocket, and was about to rise when he saw the reporter looking at him, lying sprawled in the door with his eyes open and quiet and profoundly empty — that vision without contact yet with mind or thought, like two dead electric bulbs set into his skull. “Look,” Jiggs said, “he’s—” He sprang up, then he saw the jumper’s face for the second before the jumper caught the woman’s wrist and wrenched the money from her hand and flung it like a handful of gravel against the reporter’s peaceful and open-eyed and sightless face and said in a tone of thin and despairing fury:
“I will eat and sleep on Roger and I will eat and sleep on you. But I won’t eat and sleep on your ass, see?” He took up his bag and turned; he walked fast; Jiggs and the little boy watched him turn the alley mouth and vanish. Then Jiggs looked back at the woman who had not moved and at Shumann kneeling and gathering up the scattered coins and bills from about the reporter’s motionless legs.
“Now we got to find some way to get him into the house,” Jiggs said. They did not answer. But then he did not seem to expect or desire any answer. He knelt too and began to pick up the scattered coins. “Jesus,” he said. “Jack sure threw them away. We’ll be lucky to find half of them.” But still they seemed to pay him no heed.
“How much was it?” Shumann said to the woman, extending his palm towards Jiggs.
“Six dollars and seventy cents,” the woman said. Jiggs put the coins into Shumann’s hand; as motionless as Shumann, Jiggs’ hot eyes watched Shumann count the coins by sight.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That other half.”
“I’ll just pick up some cigarettes with it,” Jiggs said. Now Shumann didn’t say anything at all; he just knelt with his hand out. After a moment Jiggs put the last coin into it. “O.K.,” Jiggs said. His hot bright eyes were now completely unreadable; he did not even watch Shumann put the money into his pocket, he just took up his canvas bag. “Too bad we ain’t got any way to get him off the street,” he said.
“Yair,” Shumann said, taking up the other bag. “We ain’t, though. So let’s go.” He went on; he didn’t even look back. It’s a valve stem has stretched,” he said. “I’ll bet a quarter. That must be why she ran hot yesterday. We’ll have to pull them all.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He walked behind the others, carrying the canvas bag. He didn’t look back either yet; he stared at the back of Shumann’s head with intent secret speculation, blank and even tranquil; he spoke to himself out of a sardonic reserve almost of humour: “Yair. I knew I would be sorry. Jesus, you would think I would have learned by now to save being honest for Sunday. Because I was all right until... and now to be hung up on a bastard that...” He looked back. The reporter still lay propped in the doorway; the quiet, thoughtful, empty eyes seemed still to watch them gravely, without either surprise or reproach. “Jesus,” Jiggs said aloud, “I told that guy last night it wasn’t paregoric: it was laudanum or something...” because for a little while now he had forgot the jug, he was thinking about the reporter and not about the jug, until now. “And it won’t be long now,” he thought, with a sort of desperate outrage, his face perfectly calm, the boots striking through the canvas sack against his legs at each step as he walked behind the other three, his eyes hot, blank and dead as if they had been reversed in his skull and only the blank backsides showed while sight contemplated the hot wild secret coiling of drink netted and snared by the fragile web of flesh and nerves in which he lived, resided. “I will call the paper and tell them he is sick,” he said out of that specious delusion of need and desire which even in this inviolable privacy brushed ruthlessly aside all admission of or awareness of lying or truth: “Maybe some of them will know some way to get in. I will tell him and Laverne that they asked me to wait and show them where...”
They reached the alley’s mouth. Without pausing Shumann craned and peered up the street where the jumper had vanished. “Get on,” Jiggs said. “We’ll find him at the bus stop. He ain’t going to walk out there no matter how much his feelings are hurt.” But the jumper was not at the bus stop. The bus was about to depart but the jumper was not in it. Another had gone ten minutes before and Shumann and the woman described the jumper to the starter and he had not been in that one either. “He must have decided to walk out, after all,” Jiggs said, moving towards the step. “Let’s grab a seat.”
“We might as well eat now,” Shumann said. “Maybe he will come along before the next bus leaves.”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “We could ask the bus driver to start taking off his overhead.”
“Yes,” the woman said, suddenly. “We can eat out there.”
“We might miss him,” Shumann said. “And he hasn’t—”
“All right,” she said; she spoke in a cold harsh tone, without looking at Jiggs. “Do you think that Jack will need more watching this morning than he will?” Now Jiggs could feel Shumann looking at him too, thoughtfully from within the machine symmetry of the new hat. But he did not move; he stood immobile, like one of the dummy figures which are wheeled out of slum-district stores and pawnshops at 8 a m., quiet waiting and tranquil; and bemused too, the intumed vision watching something which was not even thought, supplying him, out of an inextricable whirl of half-caught pictures like a roulette wheel bearing printed sentences in place of numbers, with furious tag ends of plans and alternatives — telling them he had heard the jumper say he was going back to the place on Amboise Street and that he, Jiggs, would go there and fetch him — of escaping even for five minutes and striking the first person he met and then the next and the next and the next until he got a half-dollar; and lastly and this steadily, with a desperate conviction of truth and regre
t, that if Shumann would just hand him the coin and say go get a shot, he would not even take it, or lacking that, would take the one drink and then no more, out of sheer gratitude for having been permitted to escape from impotence and need and thinking and calculation by means of which he must even now keep his tone casual and innocent.
“Who, me?” he said. “Hell, I drank enough last night to do me a long time. Let’s get on; he must have deadheaded out somehow.”
“Yair,” Shumann said, still watching him with that open and deadly seriousness. “We got to pull those valves and mike them. Listen. If things break right to-day, to-night I’ll get you a bottle. O.K.?”
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “Have I got to get drunk again? Is that it? Come on; let’s get a seat.” They got in. The bus moved. It was better then, because even if he had the half-dollar he could not buy a drink with it until the bus either stopped or reached the airport, and also he was moving towards it at last; he thought again out of the thunder of solitude, the instant of exultation between the terror and the dismay: “They can’t stop me. There ain’t enough of them to stop me. All I got to do is wait.”— “Yair,” he said, leaning forward between Shumann’s and the woman’s heads above the seat back in front of the one on which he and the boy sat, “he’s probably already on the ship. I’ll go right over and get on those valves and I can send him back to the restaurant.” But they did not find the jumper at once at the airport either, though Shumann stood for a while and looked about the forenoon’s deserted plaza as though he had expected to see the parachute jumper still in the succeeding elapse second from that in which he had walked out of sight beyond the alley’s mouth. “I’ll go on and get started,” Jiggs said. “If he’s in the hangar I’ll send him on to the restaurant.”
“We’ll eat first,” Shumann said. “You wait.”
“I ain’t hungry,” Jiggs said. “I’ll eat later. I want to get started—”
“No,” the woman said; “Roger, don’t—”
“Come on and eat some breakfast,” Shumann said. It seemed to Jiggs that he stood a long time in the bright hazy sunlight with his jaws and the shape of his mouth aching a little, but it was not long probably, and anyway his voice seemed to sound all right too.
“O.K.,” he said. “Let’s go. They ain’t my valves. I ain’t going to ride behind them at three o’clock this afternoon.” The rotunda was empty, the restaurant empty too save for themselves. “I just want some coffee,” he said.
“Eat some breakfast,” Shumann said. “Come on, now.”
“I ain’t any hungrier now than I was out there by that lamp-post two minutes ago,” Jiggs said. But his voice was still all right. “I just said I would come in, see,” he said. “I never said I would eat, see.” Shumann watched him bleakly.
“Listen,” he said. “You have had... was it two or three drinks this morning? Eat something. And to-night I will see that you have a couple or three drinks if you want. You can even get tight if you want. But now let’s get those valves out.” Jiggs sat perfectly still, looking at his hands on the table and then at the waitress’s arm propped beside him, wrist nestled by four Woolworth bracelets, the finger-nails five spots of crimson glitter as if they had been bought and clipped on to the finger-ends too.
“All right,” he said. “Listen too. What do you want? A guy with two or three drinks in him helping you pull valves, or a guy with a gut full of food on top of the drinks, asleep in a corner somewhere? Just tell me what you want, see? I’ll see you get it. Because listen. I just want coffee. I ain’t even telling you; I’m just asking you. Jesus, would please do any good?”
“All right,” Shumann said, “Just three breakfasts then,” he said to the waitress. “And two extra coffees. — Damn Jack,” he said. “He ought to eat too.”
“We’ll find him at the hangar,” Jiggs said. They found him there, though not at once. When Shumann and Jiggs emerged from the tool-room in their dungarees and waited outside the chicken-wire door for the woman to change and join them, they saw first five or six other dungaree figures gathered about a sandwich board which had not been there yesterday, set in the exact centre of the hangar entrance — a big board lettered heavily by hand and possessing a quality cryptic and peremptory and for the time incomprehensible as though the amplifier had spoken the words:
NOTICE
All contestants, all pilots and parachute jumpers and all others eligible to win cash prizes during this meet, are requested to meet in Superintendent’s office at 12 noon to-day. All absentees will be considered to acquiesce and submit to the action and discretion of the race committee.
The others watched quietly while Shumann and the woman read it.
“Submit to what?” one of the others said. “What is it? Do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Shumann said. “Is Jack Holmes on the field yet? Has anybody seen him this morning?”
“There he is,” Jiggs said. “Over at the ship, like I told you.”
Shumann looked across the hangar. “He’s already got the cowling off. Seer.”
“Yair,” Shumann said. He moved at once. Jiggs spoke to the man beside whom he stood, almost without moving his lips.
“Lend me half a buck,” he said. “I’ll hand it back to-night. Quick.” He took the coin; he snatched it; when Shumann reached the aeroplane Jiggs was right behind him. The jumper, crouched beneath the engine, looked up at them, briefly and without stopping, as he might have glanced up at the shadow of a passing cloud.
“You had some breakfast?” Shumann said.
“Yes,” the jumper said, not looking up again.
“On what?” Shumann said. The other did not seem to have heard. Shumann took the money from his pocket — the remaining dollar bill, three quarters and some nickels, and laid two of the quarters on the engine mount at the jumper’s elbow. “Go and get some coffee,” he said. The other did not seem to hear, busy beneath the engine. Shumann stood watching the back of his head. Then the jumper’s elbow struck the engine mount. The coins rang on the concrete floor and Jiggs stooped, ducking, and rose again, extending the coins before Shumann could speak or move.
“There they are,” Jiggs said, not loud; he could not have been heard ten feet away: the fierceness, the triumph. “There they are. Count them. Count both sides so you will be sure.” After that they did not talk any more. They worked quiet and fast, like a circus team, with the trained team’s economy of motion, while the woman passed them the tools as needed; they did not even have to speak to her, to name the tool. It was easy now, like in the bus; all he had to do was to wait as the valves came out one by one and grew in a long neat line on the work-bench and then, sure enough, it came.
“It must be nearly twelve,” the woman said. Shumann finished what he was doing. Then he looked at his watch and stood up, flexing his back and legs. He looked at the jumper.
“You ready?” he said.
“You are not going to wash up and change?” the woman said.
“I guess not,” Shumann said. “It will be that much more time wasted.” He took the money again from his pocket and gave the woman the three quarters. “You and Jiggs can get a bite when Jiggs gets the rest of the valves out. And, say” — he looked at Jiggs— “don’t bother about trying to put the micrometer on them yourself. I’ll do that when I get back. You can clean out the super-charger; that ought to hold you until we get back.” He looked at Jiggs. “You ought to be hungry now.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He had not stopped; he did not watch them go out. He just squatted beneath the engine with the spraddled tenseness of an umbrella rib, feeling the woman looking at the back of his head. He spoke now without fury, without triumph, without sound: “Yair, beat it. You can’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me but for a minute even if you tried to hold me.” He was not thinking of the woman as Laverne, as anyone: she was just the last and now swiftly fading residuum of the it, the they, watching the back of his head as he removed the super-charger without even knowing that she was a
ll ready defeated.
“Do you want to eat now?” she said. He didn’t answer. “Do you want me to bring you a sandwich?” He didn’t answer. “Jiggs,” she said. He looked up and back, his eyebrows rising and vanishing beyond the cap’s peak, the hot bright eyes blank, interrogatory, arrested.
“What? How was that?” he said: “Did you call me?”
“Yes. Do you want to go and eat now or do you want me to bring you something?”
“No. I ain’t hungry yet. I want to get done with this supercharger before I wash my hands. You go on.” But she didn’t move yet; she stood looking at him.
“I’ll leave you some money and you can go when you are ready, then.” touching the coin in his pocket through the cloth, though he did not need to since he had never ceased to feel it. He was not thinking about her, not talking to her; he spoke without triumph or exultation, quietly: “Good-bye, you snooping bitch,” he said.
But they had not been able to tell if the reporter had seen them or not, though he probably could neither see nor hear; certainly the thin youngish light-coloured negress who came up the alley about half-past nine, in a modish though not new hat and coat and carrying a wicker market-basket covered neatly with a clean napkin, decided almost immediately that he could not. She looked down at him for perhaps ten seconds with complete and impersonal speculation, then she waggled one hand before his face and called him by name: and when she reached into his pockets she did not move or shift his body at all; her hand reached in and drew out the two folded bills where Jiggs had put them with a single motion limber and boneless and softly rapacious as that of an octopus, then the hand made a second limber swift motion, inside her coat now, and emerged empty. It was her racial and sex nature to have taken but one of the bills, no matter how many there might have been — either the five or the one, depending upon her own need or desire of the moment or upon the situation itself — but now she took them both and stood again, looking down at the man in the doorway with a kind of grim though still impersonal sanctimoniousness.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 182
