“I was looking for you,” he said. From his pocket he took a neatly folded sheaf of bills. “Roger said he owed you twenty-two dollars. Is that right?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. The jumper held the money clipped between two fingers and folded over under his thumb.
“You got time to attend to some business for us or are you going to be busy?” he said.
“Busy?” the reporter said.
“Yes. Busy. If you are, say so, so I can find somebody else to do it.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”
“You sure? If not, say so. It won’t be much trouble; anybody can do it. I just thought of you because you seem to have already got yourself pretty well mixed up with us, and you will be here.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”
“All right, then. We’re going to get away to-day. No use hanging around here. Those bastards out there” — he jerked his head towards the lake, the clump of boats on the rosy water— “ain’t going to get him out from under all that muck with just a handful of ropes. So we’re going. What I want to do is leave some money with you in case they do... around out there and finally get him up.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I see.” The jumper stared at him with that bleak tense quiet.
“Don’t think I like to ask this any more than you like to hear it. But maybe you never sent for us to come here, and maybe we never asked you to move in on us: you’ll have to admit that. Anyway, it’s all done now; I can’t help it any more than you can.” The jumper’s other hand came to the money; the reporter saw how the bills had already been separated carefully into two parts and that the part which the jumper extended towards him was clipped neatly with two paper clips beneath a strip of paper bearing a neatly printed address, a name which the reporter read at a glance because he had seen it before when he watched Shumann write it on the note. “Here’s seventy-five bucks, and that’s the address. I don’t know what it will cost to ship him.
But if it is enough to ship him and still pay you your twenty-two bucks, do it. And if it ain’t enough to pay you your twenty-two and still ship him, ship him and write me and I will send you the difference.” This time the slip of paper came, folded, from his pocket. “This is mine. I kept them separate so you wouldn’t get them mixed. Do you understand? Send him to the first address, the one with the money. And if there ain’t enough left to pay you your twenty-two, write to me at the second one and I will send it to you. It may take some time for the letter to catch up with me, but I will get it sooner or later and I will send you the money. Understand?”
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“All right. I asked you if you would attend to it and you said you would. But I didn’t say anything about promise. Did I?”
“I promise,” the reporter said.
“I don’t want you to promise that. What I want you to promise is another thing. Something else. Don’t think I want to ask it; I told you that; I don’t want to ask it any more than you want to hear it. What I want you to promise is, don’t send him collect.”
“I promise,” the reporter said.
“All right. Call it a gamble on your twenty-two dollars, if you want to. But not collect. The seventy-five may not be enough. But all we got now is my nineteen-fifty from yesterday and the prize-money from Thursday. That was a hundred and four. So I can’t spare more than seventy-five. You’ll have to chance it. If the seventy-five won’t ship him ho —— — to that address I gave you, you can do either of two things. You can pay the difference yourself and write me and I will send you the difference and your twenty-two. Or if you don’t want to take a chance on me, use the seventy-five to bury him here; there must be some way you can do it so they can find him later if they want to. But don’t send him collect. I am not asking you to promise to put out any money of your own to send him back; I am just asking you to promise not to leave it so they will have to pay him out of the freight or the express office. Will you?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I promise.”
“All right,” the jumper said. He put the money into the reporter’s hand. “Thanks. I guess we will leave to-day. So I guess I will tell you good-bye.” He looked at the reporter, bleak, his face spent with sleeplessness too, standing with the injured leg propped stiffly in the shell-dust. “She took a couple of big drinks and she is asleep now.” He looked at the reporter with that bleak speculation which seemed to be almost clairvoyant. “Don’t take it too hard. You never made him try to fly that crate any more than you could have kept him from it. No man will hold that against you, and what she might hold against you won’t hurt you because you won’t ever see her again, see?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “That’s true.”
“Yair. So sometime when she is feeling better about it I will tell her how you attended to this and she will be obliged to you, and for the rest of it too. Only take a tip from me and stick to the kind of people you are used to after this.”
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“Yair.” The jumper moved, shifting the injured leg stiffly to turn, then he paused again, looking back. “You got my address; it may take some time for the letter to catch up with me. But you will get your money. Well—” He extended his hand; it was hard, not clammy, just absolutely without warmth. “Thanks for attending to this and for trying to help us out. Be good to yourself.” Then he was gone, limping savagely away. The reporter did not watch him; after awhile it was one of the soldiers who called him and showed him the gap in the barricade.
“Better put that stuff into your pocket, doc,” the soldier said. “Some of these guys will be cutting your wrist off.” The cab, the taxi, ran with the sun, yet a ray of it fell through the back window and glinted on a chromium fitting on the collapsible seat, and though after awhile the reporter gave up trying to move the seat and finally thought of laying his hat over the light-point, he still continued to try to blink away that sensation of light fine sand inside his lids. It didn’t matter whether he watched the backward-streaming wall of moss and live oaks above the dark water-glints or whether he tried to keep vision, sight, inside the cab. As soon as he closed them he would find himself, out of some attenuation of weariness, sleeplessness, confusing both the living and the dead without concern now, with profound conviction of the complete unimportance of either or of the confusion itself, trying with that mindless and unflagging optimism to explain to someone that she did not understand and now without bothering to decide or care whether or not and why or not he was asleep.
The cab did not have to go as far up as Grandlieu Street and so the reporter did not see a clock, though by the position of the balcony’s shadow across the door beneath it he guessed it to be about nine. In the corridor he quit blinking, and on the stairs too; but no sooner had he entered the room with the sun coming into the windows and falling across the bright savage bars of the blanket on the cot (even the other blankets on the walls, which the sun did not reach, seemed to have confiscated light into their harsh red-white-and-black lightnings which they released slowly into the room as other blankets might have soaked up and then emitted the smell of horses) he began to blink again, with that intent myopic bemusement. He seemed to await the office of something outside himself before he moved and closed the jalousies before the window. It was better then because for awhile he could not see at all; he just stood there in some ultimate distillation of the savage, bright, near-tropical day, not knowing now whether he was still blinking or not, in an implacable infiltration which not even walls could stop. He came from the circumambient breathing of fish and coffee and fruit and hemp and swamp land dyked away from the stream because of which they came to exist, so that the very commerce-bearing units of their breath and life came and went not beside or among them but above them like straying skyscrapers putting in from and out to the sea. There was even less light beyond the curtain, though it was not completely dark. “How could it be,” he thought, standing qui
etly with his coat in one hand and the other already slipping the knot of his tie, thinking how no place where a man has lived for almost two years or even two weeks or even two days is completely dark to him unless he has got so fat in the senses that he is already dead walking and breathing and all places are dark to him even in sunlight. It was not completely dark but just enough so that now the room’s last long instant of illimitable unforgetting seemed to draw in quietly in a long immobility of fleeing, with a quality poised and imminent but which could not be called waiting and which contained nothing in particular of farewell, but just paused unbreathing and without impatience and incurious, for him to make the move. His hand was already on the light, the switch.
He had just finished shaving when Jiggs began to call his name from the alley. He took from the bed in passing the fresh shirt which he had laid out, and went to the window and opened the jalousie. “It’s on the latch,” he said. “Come on in.” He was buttoning the shirt when Jiggs mounted the stairs, carrying the canvas sack, wearing the tennis shoes and the boot legs.
“Well, I guess you have heard the news,” Jiggs said.
“Yes. I saw Holmes before I came to town. So I guess you’ll all be moving now.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “I’m going with Art Jackson. He’s been after me a good while. He’s got the chutes, see, and I have done some exhibition jumping and so it won’t take me long to pick up free jumping, delayed.... Then we can split the whole twenty-five bucks between ourselves. But Jesus, it won’t be like racing. Maybe I’ll go back to racing after awhile, after I have...” He stood motionless in the centre of the room, holding the dragging canvas bag, the battered brutal face lowered and sober and painfully bemused. Then the reporter discovered what he was looking at. “Jesus,” Jiggs said, “I tried again to put them on this morning and I couldn’t even seem to open the bag and take them out.” That was about ten o’clock because almost immediately the negress Leonora came in, in her coat and hat, and carrying the neat basket beneath its neat cloth so fresh that the ironed creases were still visible. But the reporter only allowed her to put the basket down.
“A bottle of wood alcohol and a can of that stuff you take grease out of clothes with,” he told her, giving her the bill; then to Jiggs: “What do you want to fix that scratch with?”
“I got something for that,” Jiggs said. “I brought that with me.” He took it from the bag — a coca cola bottle stoppered with paper and containing wing-dope. The negress left the basket and went out and returned with the two bottles, made a pot of coffee and set it with cups and sugar on the table. Then she looked again about the untouched, unused rooms, took up the basket and stood for a while and watched what they were doing with prim and grim inscrutability before departing for good. And the reporter too, sitting on the couch and blowing quietly into his cup to cool it, watched Jiggs squatting before the two gleaming boots, in the tight soiled clothes and the tennis shoes now upturned behind him, and he thought how never before had he ever heard of rubber soles wearing through. “Because what the hell do I need with a pair of new boots for Christ’s sake, when probably this time next month I won’t even have on anything to stuff into the tops of them?” Jiggs said. That stale cup between his hands, the reporter had watched Jiggs remove the polish from the boots, first with the alcohol, watching the cold dark flowing of the liquid move, already fading, up the length of each boot like the shadow of a cloud travelling along a road, and then by scraping them with the back of a knife-blade, so that at last the boots had returned to the mere shape of what they were, like the blank gunstocks manufactured for sale to fire-arms amateurs. He watched Jiggs, sitting on the couch now and with the soiled shirt for padding and the inverted boot clamped between his knees, remove delicately from the sole with sandpaper all trace of contact with the earth; and last of all, intent, his blunt grained hands, moving with minute and incredible lightness and care, begin to fill in with the wing-dope the heel-mark on the right boot’s instep so that presently it was invisible to the casual glance of anyone who did not know that it had been there. “Jesus,” Jiggs said, “if I only hadn’t walked in them. Just hadn’t creased them at the ankle. But maybe after I get them rubbed smooth again—” But when the cathedral clock struck one they had not accomplished that. Rubbing only smoothed them and left them without life; the reporter suggested floor-wax and went out and got it, and it had to be removed.
“Wait,” he said, looking at Jiggs, the gaunt face worn with fatigue and lack of sleep and filled with a spent unflagging expression of quiet endurance like a hypnotized person. “Listen. That magazine with the pictures of what you wish you could get your white American servants to wear so you could think they were English butlers, and what if you wore yourself maybe the horse would think he was in England too unless the fox happened to run under a billboard or something... About how a fox’s tail is the only...” He stared at Jiggs, who stared back at him with blinking a«d one-eyed attention. “Wait. No. It’s the horse’s bone. Not the fox; the horse’s shin-bone. That’s what we need.”
“A horse’s shin-bone?”
“For the boots. That’s what you use.”
“All right. But where—”
“I know where. We can pick it up on the way out to see Hagood. We can rent a car.” They had to walk up to Grandlieu Street to rent the car.
“Want me to drive?” Jiggs said.
“Can you?”
“Sure.”
“Then I guess you will have to,” the reporter said. “I can’t.” It was a bright, soft, sunny day, quite warm, the air filled, breathing, with a faint suspiration which made the reporter think of organs and bells — of mortification and peace and shadowy kneeling — though he heard neither. The streets were crowded, though the throngs were quiet, not only with ordinary Sunday decorum but with a certain slow tranquillity as though the very brick and stone had just recovered from fever. Now and then, in the lees of walls and gutters as they left down town behind them, the reporter saw little drifts of the spent confetti but soiled and stained now until it resembled more dingy sawdust or even dead leaves. Once or twice he saw tattered loops of the purple-and-gold bunting and once at a corner a little boy darted almost beneath the wheels with a tattered streamer of it whipping behind him. Then the city dissolved into swamp and marsh again; presently the road ran into a broad expanse of saltmarsh broken by the dazzling sun-blanched dyke of a canal; presently a rutted lane turned off into the saltgrass. “Here we are,” the reporter said. The car turned into the lane and they began to pass the débris, the silent imperishable monument tranquil in the bright sun — the old car-bodies without engines or wheels, the old engines and wheels without bodies; the rusted scraps and sections of iron machinery and standpipes and culverts rising half-buried out of the blanched sand and shell-dust which was so white itself that for a time Jiggs saw no bones at all. “Can you tell a horse from a cow?” the reporter said.
“I don’t know,” Jiggs said. “I ain’t very certain whether I can even tell a shin-bone or not.”
“We’ll get some of everything and try them all,” the reporter said. So they did; moving about, stooping (the reporter was blinking again now between the fierce quiet glare of the pigmentless sand and the ineffable and cloudless blue), they gathered up about thirty pounds of bones. They had two complete forelegs, both of which were horses’ though they did not know it, a set of shoulder-blades from a mule, and Jiggs came up with a full set of ribs which he insisted belonged to a colt but which were actually those of a big dog, and the reporter had one object which turned out not to be bone at all but the forearm from a piece of statuary. “We ought to have something in here that will do,” he said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Now which way?” They did not need to return through the city. They skirted it, leaving the saltmarsh behind and now, crossing no actual boundary or demarcation and challenged by no sentry, they entered a region where even the sunlight seemed different, where it filtered among the ordered live oaks and f
ell suavely upon parked expanses and vistas beyond which the homes of the rich, oblivious and secure, presided above clipped lawns and terraces, with a quality of having itself been passed by appointment through a walled gate by a watchman. Presently they ran along a picket-line of palm-trunks beyond which a clipped fairway stretched, broken only by sedate groups of apparently armed men and boys all moving in one direction like a kind of decorously embattled skirmish advance.
“It ain’t four yet,” the reporter said. “We can wait for him right here, at number fifteen.” So after a time Hagood, preparing to drive with his foursome, his ball teed and addressed, looked up and saw them standing quietly just inside the club’s grounds, the car waiting in the road behind them, watching him — the indefatigable and now ubiquitous cadaver and the other, the vicious half-metamorphosis between thug and horse — the tough, hard, blunt face to which the blue swollen eye lent no quality of pity or suffering, made it look not at all like a victim or one deserving compassion, but merely like a pirate. Hagood stepped down from the tee.
“A message from the office,” he said quietly. “You fellows drive and play on; I’ll catch you.” He approached Jiggs and the reporter. “How much do you want this time?” he said.
“Whatever you will let me have,” the reporter said.
“So,” Hagood said quietly. “It’s that bad this time, is it?” The reporter said nothing; they watched Hagood take his wallet from his hip-pocket and open it. “This is the last, this time, I suppose?” he said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’re leaving to-night.” From the wallet Hagood took a thin sheaf of cheque blanks, “So you won’t suggest a sum yourself,” Hagood said. “You are using psychology on me.”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 193
