Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “If he found any of hit left hit wouldn’t learn him no lesson,” she said, aloud. “Laying out here in the street, drunk. Ain’t no telling where he been at, but hit couldn’t a been much for them to let him git back out and that much money in his pocket.” She took a key from somewhere beneath the coat and unlocked the door and caught him back in her turn as he began to tumble slowly and deliberately into the corridor, and entered herself. She was not gone long and now she carried the dish-pan of dirty water, which she flung suddenly into his face and caught him again as he gasped and started. “I hopes you had sense enough to left your pocket-book in the house for you decided to take a nap out here,” she cried, shaking him. “If you didn’t, I bound all you got left now is the pocket-book.” She carried him “Money?” he said. “What do I need with money up to my elbows in this engine?” She turned away then. He watched her pause and call the little boy, who came out of a group across the hangar and joined her; they went on towards the apron and disappeared. Then Jiggs rose; he laid the tool down carefully, up the cramped stairs almost bodily, like that much firehose, and left him apparently unconscious again on the cot and went beyond the curtain and looked once with a perfectly inscrutable face at the neat bed which but one glance told her was not her handiwork. From the basket she took an apron and a bright handkerchief; when she returned to the reporter she wore the apron and the handkerchief about her head in place of the hat and coat, and she carried the dish-pan filled now with fresh water, and soap and towels. She had done this before too, apparently, stripping the fouled shirt from the man who was her employer for this half-hour of the six weekdays, and both washing him off and slapping him awake during the process until he could see and hear again. “It’s past ten o’clock,” she said. “I done lit the gas so you can shave.”

  “Shave?” he said. “Didn’t you know? I don’t have to ever shave again. I’m fired.”

  “The more reason for you to git up from here and try to look like something.” His hair, soaked, was plastered to his skull, yet it fitted no closer to the bones and ridges and joints than the flesh of his face did, and now his eyes did indeed look like holes burned with a poker in a parchment diploma, some post-graduate certificate of excess. Naked from the waist up, it seemed as if you not only saw his ribs front and side and rear, but that you also saw the entire rib-cage complete from any angle like you can see both warp and woof of screen wire from either side. He swayed laxly beneath her limber soft and ungentle hands, articulate and even collected though moving for a while yet in the twilight between the delusion of drunkenness and the delusion of sobriety.

  “Are they gone?” he said. The negress’s face and manner did not change at all.

  “Is who gone?” she said.

  “Yair,” he said drowsily. “She was here last night. She slept yonder in the bed last night. There was just one of them slept with her and there could have been both of them. But she was here. And it was him himself that wouldn’t let her drink, that took the glass out of her hand. Yair. I could hear all the long soft waiting sound of all woman-meat in bed beyond the curtain.” At first, for the moment, the negress did not even realize what it was touching her thigh until she looked down and saw the stick-like arm, the brittle light and apparently senseless hand like a bundle of dried twigs too, blundering and fumbling stiffly at her while in the gaunt eye-sockets the eyes looked like two spots of dying daylight caught by water at the bottom of abandoned wells. The negress did not become coy or outraged; she avoided the apparently blind or possibly just still insensible hand with a single supple shift of her hips, speaking to him, calling him by name, pronouncing the in i s t e r in full, in the flat lingering way of negroes, like it had two sets of two or three syllables each.

  “Now then,” she said, “if you feel like doing something yourself, take a holt of this towel. Or see how much of whatever money you think you had folks is left you, besides leaving you asleep on the street.”

  “Money?” he said. He waked completely now, his mind did, though even yet his hands fumbled for awhile before finding the pocket while the negress watched him, standing now with her hands on her hips. She said nothing else, she just watched his quiet bemused and intent face as he plumbed his empty pockets one by one. She did not mention company again; it was he who cried, “I was out there, asleep in the alley. You know that, you found me. I left here, I was out there asleep because I forgot the key and I couldn’t get in again; I was out there a long time even before daylight. You know I was.” Still she said nothing, watching him. “I remember just when I quit remembering!”

  “How much did you have when you quit remembering?”

  “Nothing!” he said. “Nothing. I spent it all. See?” When he got up she offered to help him back to the bedroom, but he refused. He walked unsteadily still, but well enough, and when after a time she followed him she could hear him through the beaver-board wall of the alcove somewhat larger than a clothes closet which she entered too and set water to heat on the gas plate beside which he was shaving, and prepared to make coffee. She gave the undisturbed bedroom another cold inscrutable look and returned to the front room and restored the tumbled cot, spreading the blanket and the pillows. Picking up the soiled shirt and the towel from the floor and pausing, laying the shirt on the couch but still carrying the towel, she went to the table and looked at the jug now with that bemused inscrutable expression. She wiped one of the stick glasses with finicking care and poured into it from the jug almost what a thimble would have held and drank it, the smallest finger of that hand crooked delicately, in a series of birdlike and apparently extremely distasteful sips. Then she gathered up what she could conveniently carry of the nights misplaced litter and returned beyond the curtain, though when she went to where she had set the basket on the floor against the wall with the hat and coat lying upon it, you could not hear her cross the floor at all nor stoop and take from the basket an empty pint bottle sparklingly clean as a sterilized milk bottle. Ordinarily she would not have filled the flask at any single establishment of her morning round, on the contrary filling the bottle little by little with a sort of niggard and foresighted husbandry and arriving at home in mid-afternoon with a pint of liquid weird, potent, anonymous, and strange; but once more she seemed to find the situation its own warrant, returning and putting the filled flask back into the basket still without any sound. The reporter heard only the broom for a time, and other muted sounds as though the room were putting itself to rights by means of some ghostly and invisible power of its own, until she came at last to the alcove’s doorway, where he stood tying his tie, with the hat and coat on again and the basket beneath its neat napkin again on her arm.

  “I’m through,” she said. “The coffee’s ready, but you better not waste no time over drinking hit.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll have to make another loan from you.”

  “You won’t need but a dime to get to the paper. Ain’t you got even that much left?”

  “I ain’t going to the paper. I’m fired, I tell you. I want two dollars.”

  “I has to work for my money. Last time I lent you hit took you three weeks to start paying me back.”

  “I know. But I have to have it. Come on, Leonora. I’ll pay you back Saturday.” She reached inside her coat; one of the bills was his own.

  “The key’s on the table,” she said. “I washed hit off too.” It lay there, on the table clean and empty save for the key; he took it up and mused upon it with that face which the few hours of violent excess had altered from that of one brightly and peacefully dead to that of one coming back from, or looking out of, hell itself.

  “But it’s all right,” he said. “It don’t matter. It ain’t anything.” He stood in the clean empty room where there was not even a cigarette-stub or a burned match to show any trace. “Yair. She didn’t even leave a hair-pin,” he thought. “Or maybe she don’t use them. Or maybe I was drunk and they were not even here”; looking down at the key with a grimace faint and tragic w
hich might have been called smiling while he talked to himself, giving himself the advice which he knew he was not going to take when he insisted on borrowing the two dollars. “Because I had thirty before I spent the eleven-eighty and then the five for the absinth. That left about thirteen.” Then he cried, not loud, not moving: “Besides, maybe she will tell me. Maybe she intended to all the time but they couldn’t wait for me to come to,” without even bothering to tell himself that he knew he was lying, just saying quietly and stubbornly, “All right. But I’m going anyway. Even if I don’t do anything but walk up where she can see me and stand there for a minute.”

  He held the key in his hand now while the door clicked behind him, standing for a moment longer with his eyes shut against the impact of light, of the thin sun, and then opening them, steadying himself against the door frame where he had slept, remembering the coffee which the negress had made and he had forgot about until now, while the alley swam away into mirage shapes, tilting like the sea or say the lake surface, against which the ordeal of destination, of hope and dread, shaped among the outraged nerves of vision the bright vague pavilion glitter beneath the whipping purple-and-gold pennons. “It’s all right,” he said. “It ain’t nothing but money. It don’t matter.”

  It was not two when he reached the airport, but already the parking lots along the boulevard were filling, with the young men paid doubtless out of some wearily initialled national fund, in the purple-and-gold caps lent or perhaps compulsory, clinging to running-boards, moving head-and-shoulders above the continuous top-line of already parked cars as though they consisted of torsos alone and ran on wires for no purpose and towards no discernible destination. A steady stream of people flowed along the concrete gutters, converging towards the entrances, but the reporter did not follow. To the left was the hangar where they would be now but he did not go there either; he just stood in the bright hazy-damp-filled sunlight, with the pennons whipping stiffly overhead and the wind which blew them seeming to blow through him too, not cold, not unpleasant: just whipping his clothing about him as if it blew unimpeded save by the garment, through his rib-cage and among his bones. “I ought to eat,’” he thought. “I ought to,” not moving yet as though he hung static in a promise made to someone which he did not believe even yet that he was going to break. The restaurant was not far; already it seemed to him that he could hear the clash and clatter and the voices and smell the food, thinking of the three of them yesterday while the little boy burrowed with flagging determination into the second plate of ice-cream. Then he could hear the sounds, the noise, and smell the food itself as he stood looking at the table where they had sat yesterday, where a family group from a grandmother to an infant in arms now sat. He went to the counter. “Breakfast,” he said.

  “What do you want to eat?” the waitress said.

  “What do people eat for breakfast?” he said, looking at her — a porcelain-faced woman whose hair, complexion and uniform appeared to have been made of various shades of that material which old-time book-keepers used to protect their sleeves with — and smiling: or he would have called it smiling. “That’s right. It ain’t breakfast now, is it?”

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “Roast beef,” his mind said at last. “Potatoes,” he said. “It don’t matter.”

  “Sandwich or lunch?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes, what? You wanna order don’t you wanna?”

  “Sandwich,” he said.

  “Mash one!” the waitress cried.

  “And that’s that,” he thought, as though he had discharged the promise; as though by ordering, acquiescing to the idea, he had eaten the food too. “And then I will...” Only the hangar was not the mirage but the restaurant, the counter, the clash and clatter, the sound of food and of eating. It seemed to him that he could see the group: the aeroplane, the four dungaree figures, the little boy in dungarees too, himself approaching: I hope you found everything you wanted before you left? Yes, thank you. It was thirteen dollars. Just till Saturday — No matter; it don’t matter; don’t even think of it. Now suddenly he heard the amplifier too in the rotunda; it had been speaking for some time but he had just noticed it:

  “... second day of the Feinman Airport dedication invitation meet held under the official rules of the American Aeronautical Association and through the courtesy of the city of New Valois and of Colonel H. I. Feinman, Chairman of the Sewage Board of New Valois. Events for the afternoon as follows...”He quit listening to it then, drawing from his pocket the pamphlet programme of yesterday and opening it at the second fading imprint of the mimeograph:

  FRIDAY

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

  3.00 — p m. Scull Speed Dash. 375 cu in. Qualifying speed 180 in p h. Purse $325.00 (l, 2, 3, 4).

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

  Frank Burnham, United States.

  4.30 — p m. Scull Speed Dash. 575 cu in. Qualifying speed, 200 in p h. Purse $650.00 (l, 2, 3, 4).

  5.00 — p m. Delayed Parachute Drop.

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

  Lieut. Frank Burnham.

  He continued to look at the page long after the initial impact of optical surprise had faded. “That’s all,” he said. “That’s all she would have to do. Just tell me they... It ain’t the money. She knows it ain’t that. It ain’t the money with me any more than it is with them,” he said; the man had to speak to him twice before the reporter knew he was there. “Hello,” he said.

  “So you got out here after all,” the other said. Behind the man stood another, a short man with morose face, carrying a newspaper camera.

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “Hi, Jug,” he said to the second man. The first looked at him curiously.

  “You look like you have been dragged through hell by the heels,” he said. “You going to cover this to-day too?”

  “Not that I know of,” the reporter said. “I understand I am fired. Why?”

  “I was about to ask you. Hagood phoned me at four this morning, out of bed. He told me to come out to-day and if you were not here, to cover it. But mostly to watch out for you if you came and to tell you to call him at this number.” He took a folded strip of paper from his vest and gave it to the reporter. “It’s the country club. He said to call him as soon as I found you.”

  “Thanks,” the reporter said. But he did not move. The other looked at him.

  “Well, what do you want to do? You want to cover it or you want me to?”

  “No. I mean, yes. You take it. It don’t matter. Jug knows better what Hagood wants than you or I either.”

  “O.K.,” the other said. “Better call Hagood right away, though.”

  “I will,” the reporter said. Now the food came; the heaped indestructible plate and the hand scrubbed, with vicious coral nails, the hand too looking as if it had been conceived formed and baked in the kitchen, or perhaps back in town and sent out by light and speedy truck along with the scrolled squares of pastry beneath the plate-glass counter. He looked at both the food and the hand from the crest of a wave of pure almost physical flight. “Jesus, sister,” he said, “I was joking with the wrong man, wasn’t I?” But he drank the coffee and ate some of the food; he seemed to watch himself creeping slowly and terrifically across the plate like a mole, blind to all else and deaf now even to the amplifier; he ate a good deal of it, sweating, seeming to chew for ever and ever before getting each mouthful in position to be swallowed. “I guess that’ll be enough,” he said at last. “Jesus, it will have to be,” he said. He was in the rotunda now and moving towards the gates into the stands before he remembered and turned and breasted the stream towards the entrance and so outside and into the bright soft hazy sunlight with its quality of having been recently taken out of water and not yet thoroughly dried and full of the people, the faces, the cars coming up and discharging and moving on. Across the plaza the hangar wing seemed to sway
and quiver like a grounded balloon. “But I feel better,” he thought. “I must. They would not have let me eat all that and not feel better because I can’t possibly feel as bad as I still think I do.” He could hear the voice again now from the amplifier above the entrance.

  “... wish to announce that due to the tragic death of Lieutenant Frank Burnham last night, the airport race committee has discontinued the evening events.... The time is now one-forty-two. The first event on to-day’s programme will...” The reporter stopped.

  “One-forty-two,” he thought. Now he could feel something which must have been the food he had just eaten beating slow and steady against his skull which up to this time had been empty, had hardly troubled him at all except for the sensation of being about to float off like one of the small balloons escaped from the hand of a child at a circus, trying to remember what hour the programme had allotted to the three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch race, thinking that perhaps when he got into the shade he could bear to look at the programme again. “Since it seems I am bound to offer her the chance to tell me that they stole... not the money. It’s not the money. It’s not that.” Now the shade of the hangar fell upon him and he could see the programme again, the faint mimeographed letters beating and pulsing against his cringing eyeballs and steadying at last so that he could read his watch. It would be an hour still before he could expect to find her alone.

  He turned and followed the hangar wall and passed beyond it. Across the way the parking lot was almost full and there was another stream here, moving towards the bleachers. Though he stood on the edge of it while his eyeballs still throbbed and watched the other fringe, slowing and clotting before one of the temporary wooden refreshment booths which had sprung up about the borders of the airport property as the photographs of the pilots and machines had bloomed in the shop windows down town, it was some time before he began to realize that something beside the spectacle (still comparatively new) of outdoors drinking must be drawing them. Then he thought he recognized the voice and then he did recognize the raked filthy swagger of the cap and moved, pressing, filtering, on and into the crowd and so came between Jiggs’ drunken belligerent face and the Italian face of the booth’s proprietor who was leaning across the counter and shouting, “Bastard, huh? You theenk bastard, hey?”