“Watch him! Oh, can he fly! Can he fly! And Ord ain’t going to beat the Ninety-Two to — Second money Thursday, and if Ord ain’t going to — Oh, watch him! Watch him!” She turned: the jaw, pale eyes, the voice which he did not even listen to:
“Yes. The money will be fine.” Then he even stopped looking at her, staring down the runway as the four aeroplanes, now in two distinct pairs, came in towards the field, increasing fast. The mechanic was talking again:
“He’s in! Jesus, he’s going to try Ord here! And look at Ord giving him room—” The two in front began to bank at the same time, side by side, the droning roar drawing down and in as though sucked down out of the sky by them in place of being produced by them. The reporter’s mouth was still open; he knew that by the needling of nerves in his sore jaw. Later he was to remember seeing the ice-cream cone crush in his fist and begin to ooze between his fingers as he let the little boy slide to the ground and took his hand. Not now though; now the two aeroplanes, side by side, and Shumann outside and above, banked into the pylon as though bolted together, when the reporter suddenly saw something like a light scattering of burnt paper or feathers floating in the air above the pylon-tip He was watching this, his mouth still open, when a voice somewhere said, “Ahhhhhhh!” and he saw Shumann now shooting almost straight upward and then a whole waste-basketful of the light trash blew out of the aeroplane.
They said later about the apron that he used the last of his control before the fuselage broke to zoom out of the path of the two aeroplanes behind while he looked down at the close-peopled land and the empty lake, and made a choice before the tail-group came completely free. But most of them were busy saying how his wife took it, how she did not scream or faint (she was standing quite near the microphone, near enough for it to have caught the scream) but instead just stood there and watched the fuselage break in two and said, “Oh, damn you, Roger! Oh, damn you! damn you!” and turning, snatched the little boy’s hand and ran towards the sea-wall, the little boy dangling vainly on his short legs between her and the reporter who, holding the little boy’s other hand, ran at his loose lightly-clattering gallop like a scarecrow in a gale, after the bright plain shape of love. Perhaps it was the added weight because she turned, still running, and gave him a single pale, cold, terrible look, crying:
“God damn you to hell! Get away from me!”
Love-song of J. A. Prufrock
ON THE SHELL beach between the boulevard and the seaplane slip one of the electric company’s trucks stood while its crew set up a searchlight at the-water’s edge. When the photographer called Jug saw the reporter; he was standing beside the empty truck, in the backwash which it created between the faces beyond the police line, and the men — police and newspaper men and airport officials and the others, the ones without authority or object who manage to pass police lines at all scenes of public violence — gathered along the beach. The photographer approached at a flagging trot, the camera banging against his flank. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I got that, all right. Only Jesus, I near vomited into the box while I was changing plates.” Beyond the crowd at the water-edge and just beyond the outer markers of the seaplane basin a police-launch was scattering the fleet of small boats which, like most of the people on the beach itself, had appeared as though by magic from nowhere like crows, to make room for the dredge-boat to anchor over the spot where the aeroplane was supposed to have sunk. The seaplane slip, dredged out, was protected from the sluggish encroachment of the lake’s muddy bottom by a sunken mole composed of refuse from the city itself — shards of condemned paving and masses of fallen walls and even discarded automobile bodies — any and all the refuse of man’s twentieth century clotting into communities large enough to pay a mayor’s salary — dumped into the lake. Either directly above or just outside of this mass the aeroplane was believed, from the accounts of three oystermen in a dory who were about two hundred yards away, to have struck the water. The three versions varied as to the exact spot, despite the fact that both wings had reappeared on the surface almost immediately and been towed ashore, but then one of the oystermen (from the field, the apron, Shumann had been seen struggling to open the cockpit hatch as though to jump, as though with the intention of trying to open his parachute despite his lack of height) — one of the oystermen claimed that the body had fallen off the machine, having either extricated itself or been flung out. But the three agreed that the body and the machine were both either upon or beside the mole from whose vicinity the police-launch was now harrying the small boats.
It was after sunset. Upon the mirror-smooth water even the little foul skiffs — the weathered and stinking dories and dinghies of oyster-and shrimp-men — had a depthless and fairy-light quality as they scattered like butterflies or moths before a mechanical reaper, just ahead of the trim, low, martial-coloured police-launch, on to at which the moment the photographer saw being transferred from one of the skiffs two people whom he recognized as being the dead pilot’s wife and child. Among them the dredge looked like something antediluvian crawled for the first time into light, roused but not alarmed by the object or creature out of the world of light and air which had plunged without warning into the watery fastness where it had been asleep. “Jesus,” the photographer said. “Why wasn’t I standing right here: Hagood would have had to raise me then. Jesus God,” he said in a hoarse tone of hushed and unbelieving amazement, “how’s it now for being a poor bastard that never even learned to roller-skate?” The reporter looked at him, for the first time. The reporter’s face was perfectly calm; he looked down at the photographer, turning carefully as though he were made of glass and knew it, blinking a little, and spoke in a peaceful dreamy voice such as might be heard where a child is sick — not sick for a day or even two days, but for so long that even wasting anxiety has become mere surface habit:
“She told me to go away. I mean, to go clean away, like to another town.”
“She did?” the photographer said. “To what town?”
“You don’t understand,” the reporter said, in that peaceful baffled voice. “Let me explain to you.”
“Yair; sure,” the photographer said. “I still feel like vomiting too. But I got to get on in with these plates. And I bet you ain’t even phoned in. Have you?”
“What?” the reporter said. “Yes. I phoned in. But listen. She didn’t understand. She told me—”
“Come on, now,” the other said. “You will have to call in with the build-up on it. Jesus, I tell you I feel bad too. Here, smoke a cigarette. Yair. I could vomit too. But what the hell? He ain’t our brother. Come on, now.” He took the cigarettes from the reporter’s coat and-took two from the pack and struck a match. The reporter roused somewhat; he took the burning match himself and held it to the two cigarettes. But then at once the photographer seemed to watch him sink back into that state of peaceful physical anæsthesia as though the reporter actually were sinking slowly away from him into clear and limpid water out of which the calm, slightly distorted face looked and the eyes blinked at the photographer with that myopic earnestness while the voice repeated patiently:
“But you don’t understand. Let me explain it to — —”
“Yair; sure,” the other said. “You can explain it to Hagood while we are getting a drink.” The reporter moved obediently. But before they had gone very far the photographer realized that they had reassumed their customary mutual physical complementing when working together: the reporter striding on in front and the photographer trotting to keep up. “That’s the good thing about being him,” the photographer thought. “He don’t have to move very far to go nuts in the first place and so he don’t have so far to come back.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Let’s move. We got to eat, and the rest of them have got to read. And if they ever abolish fornication and blood, where in hell will we all be? — Yair.
You go on in with what you got; if they get it up right away it will be too dark to take anything. I’ll stay out here and cove
r it. You can tell Hagood.”
“Yair; sure,” the photographer said, trotting, the camera bouncing against his flank. “We’ll have a shot and we’ll feel better. For Christ’s sake, we never made him go up in it.” Before they reached the rotunda the sunset had faded; even while they walked up the apron the boundary lights came on, and now the flat sword-like sweep of the beacon swung in across the lake and vanished for an instant in a long flick! as the turning eye faded them full, and then reappeared again as it swung now over the land to complete its arc. The field, the apron, was empty, but the rotunda was full of people, and with a cavernous murmuring sound which seemed to linger not about the mouths which uttered it but to float somewhere about the high serene shadowy dome overhead. As they entered a newsboy screamed at them, flapping the paper, the headline: PILOT KILLED. Shumann Crashes Into Lake. SECOND FATALITY OF AIR-MEET as it too flicked away. The bar was crowded too, warm with lights and with human bodies. The photographer led the way now, shouldering into the rail, making room for the reporter beside him. “Rye, huh?” he said, then to the bar-tender, loudly: “Two ryes.”
“Yair; rye,” the reporter said. Then he thought quietly, “I can’t. I cannot.” He felt no revulsion from his insides; it was as though his throat and the organs of swallowing had experienced some irrevocable alteration of purpose from which he would suffer no inconvenience whatever, but which would for ever more mark the exchange of an old psychic as well as physical state for a new one, like the surrendering of a maidenhead. He felt profoundly and peacefully empty inside, as though he had vomited and very emptiness had supplied into his mouth or somewhere about his palate like a lubricant a faint thin taste of salt which was really pleasant: the taste not of despair but of Nothing. “I’ll go and call in now,” he said.
“Wait,” the photographer said. “Here comes your drink.”
“Hold it for me,” the reporter said. “It won’t take but a minute.” There was a booth in the corner, the same from which he had called Hagood yesterday. As he dropped the coin in he closed the door behind him. The automatic dome light came on; he opened the door until the light went off again. He spoke, not loudly, his voice murmuring back from the close walls as he recapitulated at need with succinct and patient care as though reading into the telephone in a foreign tongue: “... yes, f-u-s-e-l-a-g-e. The body of the aeroplane, broke off at the tail.... No, he couldn’t have landed it. The pilots here said he used up what control he had left getting out of the way of the others and to head towards the lake instead of the grandst —
No, they say not. He wasn’t high enough for the chute to have opened even if he had got out of the ship... yair, dredge-boat was just getting into position when I... they say probably right against the mole; it may have struck the rocks and slid down.... Yair, if he should be close enough to all that muck the dredge-boat can’t... yair, probably a diver to-morrow, unless sometime during the night. And by that time the crabs and gars will have... yair, I’ll stay out here and flash you at midnight.”
When he came out of the booth, back into the light, he began to blink again as if he had a little sand in his eyes, trying to recall exactly what eye-moisture tasted like, wondering if perhaps the thin moist salt in his mouth might not somehow have got misplaced from where it belonged. The photographer still held his place at the bar and the drink was waiting, though this time he only looked down at the photographer, blinking, almost smiling. “You go on and drink it,” he said. “I forgot I went on the wagon yesterday.” When they went out to the cab, it was dark; the photographer, ducking, the camera jouncing on its strap, scuttled into the cab, turning a face likewise amazed and spent.
“It’s cold out here,” he said. “Jesus, I’m going to lock the damn door and turn on both them red lamps and fill me a good big tray to smell and I’m going to just sit there and get warm. I’ll tell Hagood you are on the job.” The face vanished, the cab went on, curving away towards the boulevard where beyond and apparently just behind the ranked palms which lined it the glare of the city was visible even from here upon the overcast. People were still moiling back and forth across the plaza and in and out of the rotunda, and the nightly overcast had already moved in from the lake; against it the measured and regular sword-sweep of the beacon was quite distinct, and there was some wind in it too; a long breath of it at the moment came down over the building and across the plaza and the palms along the boulevard began to clash and hiss with a dry wild sound. The reporter began to inhale the dark chill wind; it seemed to him that he could taste the lake, water, and he began to pant, drawing the air in by lungsful and expelling it and snatching another lungful of it as if he were locked inside a burning room and were hunting handful by handful through a mass of cotton batting for the door key. Ducking his head he hurried past the lighted entrance and the myriad eyes; his face for the time had frozen, like a piece of uncoiled machinery freezes, into a twisted grimace which filled his sore jaw with what felt like icy needles, so that Ord had to call him twice before he turned and saw the other getting out of his roadster, still in the suède jacket and the hind-part-before cap in which he flew.
“I was looking for you,” Ord said, taking something from his pocket — the narrow strip of paper folded again as it had lain in the reporter’s fob pocket this morning before he gave it to Marchand. “Wait; don’t tear it,” Ord said. “Hold it a minute.” The reporter held it while Ord struck the match. “Go on,” Ord said. “Look at it.” With his other hand he opened the note out, holding the match so that the reporter could see it, identify it, waiting while the reporter stood with the note in his hand long enough to have examined it anyway. “That’s it, ain’t it?” Ord said.
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“All right. Stick it to the match. I want you to do it yourself.... Damn it, drop it! Do you want to—” As it floated down the flame seemed to turn back and upward, to climb up the falling scrap and on into space, vanishing; the charred carbon leaf drifted on without weight or sound and Ord ground his foot on it. “You bastard,” he said. “You bastard.”
“God, yes,” the reporter said, as quietly. “I’ll make out another one to-morrow. You will just have to take me alone—”
“Like hell. What are they going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” the reporter said. Then at once he began to speak in that tone of peaceful and bemused incomprehensibility. “You see, she didn’t understand. She told me to go away. I mean, away. Let me ex—” But he stopped, thinking quietly, “Wait. I mustn’t start that. I might not be able to stop it next time.” He said: “They don’t know yet, of course, until after the dredge... I’ll be there. I’ll see to them.”
“Bring her on over home if you want to. But you better go yourself and take a couple of drinks. You don’t look so good either.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Only I quit yesterday. I got mixed up and went on the wagon.”
“Yes?” Ord said. “Well, I’m going home. You better get in touch with her right away. Get her away from here. Just put her in a car and come on over home. If it’s where they say it is, it will take a diver to get him out.” He returned to the roadster; the reporter had already turned on too, back towards the entrance before he was aware of it, stopping again; he could not do it — the lights and the faces, not even for the warmth of lights and human suspirations — thinking, “Jesus, if I was to go in there I would drown.” He could go around the opposite hangar and reach the apron and be on his way back to the seaplane slip. But when he moved it was towards the first hangar, the one in which it seemed to him that he had spent enough of incomprehensible and unpredictable frenzy and travail to have been born and raised there, walking away from the lights and sound and faces, walking in solitude where despair and regret could sweep down over the building and across the plaza and on into the harsh thin hissing of the palms and so at least he could breathe it in, at least endure. It was as though some sixth sense, some economy out of profound inattention guided him, on through the bla
nk door and the tool-room and into the hangar itself where in the hard light of the overhead clusters the motionless aeroplanes squatted in fierce and depthless relief among one another’s monstrous shadows, and on to where Jiggs sat on the tongue of a dolly, the shined boots rigid and fiercely high lighted on his out-thrust feet, gnawing painfully at a sandwich with one side of his face, his head turned parallel to the earth like a dog eats while the one good eye rolled, painful and bloodshot, up at the reporter.
“What is it you want me to do?” Jiggs said. The reporter blinked down at him with quiet and myopic intensity.
“You see, she didn’t understand,” he said. “She told me to go away. To let her alone. And so I can’t...”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 191
