“Not there,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “We don’t want to go there.” They turned; the reporter led the way now, working them clear again of the people passing towards the stands. He could feel his jaw beginning to ache now, and looking back and upward he watched the aeroplanes come into position one by one as beneath them each dropping body bloomed into parachute. “And I never even heard the bomb,” he thought. “Or maybe that was what I thought hit me.” He looked at Jiggs walking stiffly beside him, as though the spring steel of his legs had been reft by enchantment of temper and were now mere dead iron. “Listen,” he said. He stopped and stopped Jiggs too, looking at him and speaking to him tediously and carefully as though Jiggs were a child. “I’ve got to go to town. To the paper. The boss sent for me to come in, see? Now you tell me where you want to go. You want to go somewhere and lie down awhile? Maybe I can find a car where you can—”
“No,” Jiggs said. “I’m all right. Go on.”
“Yes. Sure. But you ought—” Now all the parachutes were open; the sunny afternoon was filled with down-cupped blooms like inverted water hyacinths; the reporter shook Jiggs a little. “Come on, now. What’s next now, after the chute jumps?”
“What?” Jiggs said. “Next? What next?”
“Yes. What? Can’t you remember?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Next.” For a full moment the reporter looked down at Jiggs with a faint lift of one side of his mouth as though favouring his jaw, not of concern or regret or even hopelessness so much as of faint and quizzical foreknowledge.
“Yes,” he said. He took the key from his pocket. “Can you remember this, then?” Jiggs looked at the key, blinking. Then he stopped blinking.
“Yair,” he said. “It was on the table right by the jug. And then we got hung up on the bastard laying there in the door and I let the door shut behind.. He looked at the reporter, peering at him, blinking again. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Did you bring it too?”
“No,” the reporter said.
“Hell. Gimme the key; I will go and—”
“No,” the reporter said. He put the key back into his pocket and took out the change which the Italian had given him, the three quarters. “You said five dollars. But I haven’t got that much. This is all I have. But that will be all right because if it was a hundred it would be the same; it would not be enough because all I have never is, you see? Here.” He put the three quarters into Jiggs’ hand. For a moment Jiggs looked at his hand without moving. Then the hand closed; he looked at the reporter while his face seemed to collect, to become sentient.
“Yair,” he said. “Thanks. It’s O.K. You’ll get it back Saturday. We’re in the money now; Roger and Jack and the others struck this afternoon, see? Not for the money: for the principle of the thing, see?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. He turned and went on. Now he could feel his jaw quite distinctly through the faint grimace of smiling, the grimace thin, bitter and wrung. “Yes. It ain’t the money. That ain’t it. That don’t matter.” He heard the bomb this time and saw the five aeroplanes dart upward, diminishing, as he reached the apron, beginning to pass the spaced amplifiers and the rich voice:
“... second event. Three-seventy-five cubic inch class. Some of the same boys that gave you a good race yesterday, except Myers, who is out of this race to save up for the five-fifty later this afternoon. But Ott and Bullitt are out there, and Roger Shumann who surprised us all yesterday by taking second in a field that—” He found her almost at once; she had not changed from the dungarees this time. He extended the key, feeling his jaw plainer and plainer through his face’s grimace.
“Make yourselves at home,” he said. “As long as you want to. I’m going to be out of town for a few days. So I may not even see you again. But you can just drop the key in an envelope and address it to the paper. And make yourselves at home; there is a woman comes every morning but Sunday to clean up....” The five aeroplanes came in on the first lap: the snarl, the roar banking into a series of down-wind scuttering pops as each one turned the pylon and went on.
“You mean you’re not going to need the place yourself at all?” she said.
“No. I won’t be there. I am going out of town on an assignment.”
“I see. Well, thanks. I wanted to thank you for last night, but...”
“Yair,” he said. “So I’ll beat it. You can say good-bye to the others for me.”
“Yes. But are you sure it won’t...”
“Sure. It’s all right. You make yourselves at home.” He turned; he began to walk fast, thinking fast, “Now if I only can just... “He heard her call him twice; he thought of trying to run on his boneless legs and knew that he would fall, hearing her feet just behind him now, thinking, “No. No. Don’t. That’s all I ask. No. No.” Then she was beside him; he stopped and turned, looking down at her.
“Listen,” she said. “We took some money out of your...”
“Yes. I knew. It’s O.K. You can hand it back. Put it in the envelope with the...”
“I intended to tell you as soon as I saw you to-day. It was...”
“Yair; sure.” He spoke loudly now, turning again, fleeing before yet beginning to move. “Any time. Good-bye now.”
“We took six-seventy. We left...” Her voice died away; she stared at him, at the thin rigid grimace which could hardly have been called smiling but which could have been called nothing else. “How much did you find in your pocket this morning?”
“It was all there,” he said. “Just the six-seventy was missing. It was all right.” He began to walk. The aeroplanes came in and turned the field pylon again as he was passing through the gate and into the rotunda. When he entered the bar the first face he saw was that of the photographer whom he had called Jug.
“I ain’t going to offer you a drink,” the photographer said, “because I never buy them for nobody. I wouldn’t even buy Hagood one.” —
“I don’t want a drink,” the reporter said. “I just want a dime.”
“A dime? Hell, that’s damn near the same as a drink.”
“It’s to call Hagood with. That will look better on your expense account than a drink would.” There was a booth in the corner; he called the number from the slip which the substitute had given him. After awhile Hagood answered. “Yair, I’m out here,” the reporter said. “Yair, I feel O.K.... Yair, I want to come in. Take something else, another assignment.... Yair, out of town if you got anything, for a day or so if you... Yair. Thanks, chief. I’ll come right on in.” He had to walk through the voice again to pass through the rotunda, and again it met him outside though for the moment he did not listen to it for listening to himself: “It’s all the same! I did the same thing myself! I don’t intend to pay Hagood either! I lied to him about money too!” and the answer, loud too: “You lie, you bastard. You’re lying, you son of a bitch.” So he was hearing the amplifier before he knew that he was listening, just as he had stopped and half turned before he knew that he had stopped, in the bright thin sunlight filled with mirage shapes which pulsed against his painful eyelids: so that when two uniformed policemen appeared suddenly from beyond the hangar with Jiggs struggling between them, his cap in one hand and one eye completely closed now and a long smear of blood on his jaw, the reporter did not even recognize him; he was now staring at the amplifier above the door as though he were actually seeing in it what he merely heard:
“ — Shumann’s in trouble; he’s out of the race; he’s turning out to — He’s cut his switch and he’s going to land; I don’t know what it is, but he’s swinging wide; he’s trying to keep clear of the other ships and he’s pretty wide and that lake’s pretty wet to be out there without any motor. — Come on, Roger; get back into the airport, guy! — He’s in now; he’s trying to get back on to the runway to land and it looks like he’ll make it all right, but the sun is right in his eyes and he swung mighty wide to keep clear of — I don’t know about this — I don’t — Hold her head
up, Roger! Hold her head up! Hold—”
The reporter began to run; it was not the crash that he heard: it was a single long exhalation of human breath as though the microphone had reached out and caught that too out of all the air which people had ever breathed. He ran back through the rotunda and through the suddenly clamorous mob at the gate, already tugging out his police card; it was as though all the faces, all the past twenty-four hours’ victories and defeats and hopes and renunciations and despairs, had been blasted completely out of his life as if they had actually been the random sheets of that organ to which he dedicated his days, caught momentarily upon one senseless member of the scarecrow which he resembled, and then blown away. A moment later, above the beads streaming up the apron and beyond the ambulance and the fire truck and the motor-cycle squad rushing across the field, he saw the aeroplane lying on its back, the under-carriage projecting into the air rigid and delicate and motionless as the legs of a dead bird.
Two hours later, at the bus stop on the Grandlieu Street corner, from where she and Shumann stood a few feet away, the woman could see the reporter standing quietly as he had emerged from the bus and surrendered the four tickets for which he had paid. She could not tell who or what he was looking at: his face was just peaceful, waiting, apparently inattentive even when the parachute jumper limped over to him, dragging savagely the leg which even through the cloth of the trousers appeared thick, stiff and ungainly with the emergency dressing from the airport’s surgery, result of having been drifted by an unforeseen wind-gust over the stands and then slammed into one of the jerry-built refreshment booths when landing his parachute.
“Look here,” he said. “This afternoon, I was mad at Jiggs. I never meant to sock you. I was worried and mad. I even thought it was still Jiggs’ face until too late.”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. He was not smiling: he was just peaceful and serene. “I guess I just got in the way.”
“I didn’t plan to. If you want any satisfaction—”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. They didn’t shake hands; the jumper just turned after a moment and dragged his leg back to where he had been standing, leaving the reporter as before, in that attitude of peaceful waiting. The woman looked at Shumann again.
“Then if the ship’s all right, why won’t Ord fly it himself, race it himself?” she said.
“Maybe he don’t have to,” Shumann said. “If I had his Ninety-Two I wouldn’t need this ship either. I guess Ord would do the same. Besides, I — we haven’t got it yet. So there ain’t anything to worry about. Because if it is a burn, Ord won’t let us have it. Yair, you see? if we can get it, that’s proof that it’s O.K. because Ord wouldn’t...” She was looking down now, motionless save for her hands, with the heel of one of which she was striking lightly the other’s palm. Her voice was flat, hard, and low, not carrying three feet:
“We. We. He has boarded and lodged us for a day and night now, and now he is even going to get us another ship to fly. And all I want is just a house, a room; a cabin will do, a coal-shed where I can know that next Monday and the Monday after that and the Monday after that.... Do you suppose he would have something like that he could give to me?” She turned; she said, “We better get on and get that stuff for Jack’s leg.” The reporter had not heard her, he had not been listening; now he found that he had not even been watching; his first intimation was when he saw her walking towards him. “We’re going on to your house,” she said. “I guess we’ll see you and Roger when we see you. You have changed your plan about leaving town, I imagine?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I mean no. I’m going home with a guy on the paper to sleep. Don’t you bother about me.” He looked at her, his face gaunt, serene, peaceful. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be O.K.”
“Yes,” she said. “About that money. That was the truth. You can ask Roger and Jack.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I would believe you even if I knew you had lied.”
And To-morrow
SO YOU SEE how it is,” the reporter said. He looked down at Ord too, as he seemed doomed to look down at everyone with whom he seemed perennially and perpetually compelled either to plead or just to endure: perhaps enduring and passing the time until that day when time and age would have thinned still more what blood he had and so permit him to see himself actually as the friendly and lonely ghost peering timidly down from the hayloft at the other children playing below. “The valves went bad and then he and Holmes had to go to that meeting so they could tell them that thirty per cent, exceeded the code or something: and then Jiggs went and then they didn’t have time to check the valve stems and take out the bad ones and then the whole engine went and the rudder post and a couple of longerons and to-morrow’s the last day. That’s tough luck, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” Ord said. They all three still stood. Ord had probably invited them to sit out of habit, courtesy, when they first came in, though probably he did not remember now doing so any more than the reporter and Shumann could remember declining if they had declined. But probably neither invitation nor refusal had passed at all. The reporter had brought with him into the house, the room, that atmosphere of a fifteenth-century Florentine stage scene — an evening call with formal courteous words in the mouth and naked rapiers under the cloaks. In the impregnably new glow of two rose-shaded lamps which looked like the ones that burn for three hours each night in a living-room suite in the store windows dressed by a junior man clerk, they all stood now, as they had come from the airport, the reporter in that single suit which apparently composed his wardrobe, and Shumann and Ord in grease-stained suède jackets which a third person could not have told apart, standing in the living-room of Ord’s new, neat, little flower-cluttered house built with the compact economy of an aeroplane itself, with the new matched divan and chairs and tables and lamps arranged about it with the myriad compactness of the dials and knobs of an instrument panel. From somewhere towards the rear they could hear a dinner-table being set, and a woman’s voice singing obviously to a small child. “All right,” Ord said. He did not move; his eyes seemed to watch them both without looking at either, as though they actually were armed invaders. “What do you want me to do?”
“Listen,” the reporter said. “It’s not the money, the prize; I don’t have to tell you that. You were one too, not so long ago, before you met Atkinson and got a break. Hell, look at you now, even when you got Atkinson and all you have to do is just build them without even seeing a pylon closer to it than the grand-stand, without ever taking your other foot off the ground except to get into bed. But do you? Yair; maybe it was somebody else pulling that Ninety-Two around those pylons at Chicago last summer that day; maybe that wasn’t Matt Ord at all. So you know it ain’t the money, the damn cash: Jesus Christ, he ain’t got the jack he won yesterday yet. Because if it was just the money, if he just had to have it and he come to you and told you, you would lend it to him. Yair, I know. I don’t have to tell you. Jesus, I don’t have to tell anybody that after to-day, after up there in that office at noon. Yair; listen. Suppose instead of them up there on those damn hard chairs to-day it had been a gang of men hired to go down into a mine say, not to do anything special down there but just to see if the mine would cave in on top of them, and five minutes before they went down the big-bellied guys that own the mine would tell them that everybody’s pay had been cut two and a half per cent, to print a notice how the elevator or something had fell on one of them the night before: would they go down? Naw. But did these guys refuse to fly that race? Maybe it was not a valve that Shumann’s ship swallowed but a peanut somebody in the grand-stand threw down on the apron. Yair; they could have kept back the ninety-seven and a half and give them the two and a half and it would—”
“No,” Ord said. He spoke with complete and utter finality. “I wouldn’t even let Shumann make a field hop in it. I wouldn’t let any man, let alone fly it around a closed course. Even if it was qualified.” Now it was as though w
ith a word Ord had cut through the circumlocution like through a light net and that the reporter, without breaking stride, had followed him on to new ground as bleak and forthright as a prize-ring.
“But you have flown it. I don’t mean that Shumann can fly as good as you can; I don’t believe anybody can do that even though I know mine ain’t even an opinion: it’s just that hour’s dual you give me talking. But Shumann can fly anything that will fly. I believe that. And we will get it qualified; the licence is still O.K.”
“Yes. The licence is O.K. But the reason it hasn’t been revoked yet is the Department knows I ain’t going to let it off the ground again. Only to revoke it would not be enough: it ought to be broken up and then burned, like you would kill a mad dog. Hell, no. I won’t do it. I feel sorry for Shumann, but not as sorry as I would feel to-morrow night if that ship was over at Feinman Airport to-morrow afternoon.”
“But listen, Matt,” the reporter said. Then he stopped. He did not speak loudly, and with no especial urgency, but he emanated the illusion still of having long since collapsed yet being still intact in his own weightlessness like a dandelion burr moving where there is no wind. In the soft pink glow his face appeared gaunter than ever, as though following the excess of the past night, his vital spark now fed on the inner side of the actual skin itself, paring it steadily thinner and more and more transparent, as parchment is made. Now his face was completely inscrutable. “So even if we could get it qualified, you wouldn’t let Shumann fly it.”
“Right,” Ord said. “It’s tough on him. I know that. But he don’t want to commit suicide.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “He ain’t quite got to where won’t nothing else content him. Well, I guess we better get on back to town.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 185
