“Whatever you can. Will. I know I have borrowed more from you than I have paid back. But this time maybe I can...” He drew something from his coat now and extended it — a postcard, a coloured lithograph; Hagood read the legend: Hotel Vista del Mar, Santa Monica, California, the plump arrow drawn by a hotel pen and pointing to a window.
“What?” Hagood said.
“Read it,” the reporter said. “It’s from mamma. Where they are spending their honeymoon, her and Mr. Hurtz. She said how she has told him about me and he seems to like me all right and that maybe when my birthday comes on the first of April...”
“Ah,” Hagood said. “That will be very nice, won’t it?” He took a short fountain-pen from his shirt and glanced about; now the second man, the cartoon comedy centaur who had been watching him quietly and steadily with the one bright hot eye, spoke for the first time.
“Write on my back if you want to, mister,” he said, turning and stooping, presenting a broad skin-tight expanse of soiled shirt, apparently as hard as a section of concrete, to Hagood.
“And get the hell kicked out of me and serve me right,” Hagood thought viciously. He spread the blank on Jiggs’ back and wrote the cheque and waved it dry and folded it and handed it to the reporter.
“Do you want me to sign anyth—” the reporter began.
“No. But will you let me ask a favour of you?”
“Yes, chief. Of course.”
“Go to town and look in the book and find where Doctor Legendre lives and go out there. Don’t telephone; go out there; tell him I sent you, tell him I said to give you some pills that will put you to sleep for about twenty-four hours, and go home and take them. Will you?”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. “To-morrow when you fix the note for me to sign you can pin the postcard to it. It won’t be legal, but it will be...”
“Yes,” Hagood said. “Go on, now. Please go on.”
“Yes, chief,” the reporter said. They went on. When they reached home it was almost five o’clock. They unloaded the bones and now they both worked, each with a boot, fast. It seemed to be slow work, nevertheless the boots were taking on a patina deeper and less brilliant than wax or polish.
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “If I just hadn’t creased the ankles, and if I just had kept the box and paper when I unwrapped them—”
Because he had forgotten that it was Sunday. He knew it; he and the reporter had known it was Sunday all day but they had both forgotten it; they did not remember it until, at half-past five, Jiggs halted the car before the window into which he had looked four days ago — the window from which now both boots and photographs were missing. They looked at the locked door quietly for a good while. “So we didn’t need to hurry after all,” he said. “Well, maybe I couldn’t have fooled them, anyway. Maybe I’d a had to went to the pawnshop just the same anyway.... We might as well take the car back.”
“Let’s go to the paper and cash the cheque first,” the reporter said. He had not yet looked at it; while Jiggs waited in the car he went in and returned. “It was for a hundred,” he said. “He’s a good guy. He’s been white to me, Jesus.” He got into the car.
“Now where?” Jiggs said.
“Now we got to decide now. We might as well take the car back while we are deciding.” The lights were on now; when they emerged from the garage, walking, they moved in red-green-and-white glare and flicker, crossing the outfall from the theatre entrances and the eating-places, passing athwart the hour’s rich resurgence of fish and coffee. “You can’t give it to her yourself,” the reporter said. “They would know you never had that much.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “All I could risk would have been that twenty bucks. But I’ll have room for some of it, though. If I get as much as ten from Uncle Isaac I will want to pinch myself.”
“And if we slipped it to the kid, it would be the — Wait,” he said: he stopped and looked at Jiggs. “I got it. Yair. Come on.” Now he was almost running, weaving on through the slow Sunday-evening throng, Jiggs following. They tried five drugstores before they found it — a blue-and-yellow toy hanging by a piece of cord before a rotary ventilator in similitude of flight. It had not been for sale; Jiggs and the reporter fetched the step-ladder from the rear of the store in order to take it down. “You said the train leaves at eight,” the reporter said. “We got to hurry some.” It was half-past six now as they left Grandlieu Street; when they reached the corner where Shumann and Jiggs had bought the sandwich two nights ago, they parted.
“I can see the balls from here,” Jiggs said. “Ain’t any need of you going with me; I guess I won’t have any trouble carrying what they will give me for them. You get the sandwiches and leave the door unlocked for me.” He went on, the newspaper-wrapped boots under his arm; even now as each foot flicked backward with that motion like a horse’s hock, the reporter believed that he could see the coin-shaped patch of blackened flesh in each pale sole: so that when he entered the corridor and set the door ajar, and mounted the stairs and turned on the light, he did not open the sandwiches at once. He put them and the toy aeroplane on the table and went beyond the curtain. When he emerged he carried in one hand the gallon jug (it contained now about three pints) and in the other a pair of shoes which looked as much like him as his hair or hands looked. He was sitting on the cot, smoking, when Jiggs entered, carrying now a biggish bundle, a bundle bigger even though shorter than the boots had been. “He gave me five bucks for them,” Jiggs said. “I give twenty-two and a half and wear them twice and he gives me five. Yair. He throws it away.” He laid the bundle on the couch. “So I decided that wasn’t even worth the trouble of handing to her. So I just got some presents for all of them.” He opened the parcel. It contained a box or chest of candy about the size of a suitcase and resembling a miniature bale of cotton lettered heavily by some pyrographic process: Souvenir of New Valois. Come back again and three magazines — Boys’ Life, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and one of the pulp magazines of war stories in the air. Jiggs’ blunt grained hands rifled them and evened the edges again; his brutal battered face was curiously serene. “It will give them something to do on the train, see? Now let me get my pliers and we will fix that ship.” Then he saw the jug on the table as he turned. But he did not go to it; he just stopped, looking at it, and the reporter saw the good eye rush sudden and inarticulate and hot. But he did not move. It was the reporter who went and poured the first drink and gave it to him, and then the second one. “You need one too,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I will in a minute.” But he didn’t for awhile, though he took one of the sandwiches when Jiggs opened them and then watched Jiggs, his jaw bulged by a huge bite, stoop and take from the canvas sack the cigar box and from the box produce a pair of pliers; not beginning yet to eat his own sandwich the reporter watched Jiggs raise the metal clamps which held the toy aeroplane’s tin body together and open it. The reporter produced the money — the seventy-five which the jumper had given him and the hundred from Hagood — and they wedged it into the toy and Jiggs clamped it to again.
“Yair, he’ll find it, all right,” Jiggs said. “Every toy he gets he plays with it a couple of days and then he takes it apart. To fix it, he says. But Jesus, he came by that natural; Roger’s old man is a doctor, see. A little country town where it’s mostly Swede farmers and the old man gets up at any hour of the night and rides twenty or thirty miles in a sleigh and borns the babies and cuts off arms and legs and a lot of them even pay him; sometimes it ain’t but a couple or three years before they will bring him in a ham or a bedspread or something on the instalment. So the old man wanted Roger to be a doctor too, see, and he was hammering that at Roger all the time Roger was a kid and watching Roger’s grades in school and all: so that Roger would have to doctor up his report cards for the old man but the old man never found it out; he would see Roger start off for school every morning over in town ( they lived in a kind of big place, half farm, a little ways out of town that never n
obody tried to farm much, Roger said, but his old man kept it because it was where his old man, his father’s old man, had settled when he come into the country) and he never found it out until one day he found out how Roger hadn’t even been inside the school in six months because he hadn’t never been off the place any further than out of sight down the road where he could turn and come back through the woods to an old mill his grandfather had built; and Roger had built him a motor-cycle in it out of scraps saved up from mowing-machines and clocks and such, and it run, see? That’s what saved him. When his old man saw that it would run he let Roger go then and quit worrying him to be a doctor; he bought Roger the first ship, the Hisso Standard, with the money he had been saving up to send Roger to the medical school, but when he saw that the motor-cycle would run, I guess he knew he was whipped. And then one night Roger had to make a landing without any lights and he run over a cow and cracked it up and the old man paid for having it rebuilt; Roger told me once the old man must have borrowed the jack to do it with on the farm and that he aimed to pay his old man back the first thing as soon as he could but I guess it’s O.K. because a farm without a mortgage on it would probably be against the law or something. Or maybe the old man didn’t have to mortgage the farm but he just told Roger that so Roger would pick out a vacant field next time.” The cathedral clock had struck seven shortly after Jiggs came in with his bundle; it must be about half-past seven now. Jiggs squatted, holding one of the shoes in his hand. “Jesus,” he said. “I sure won’t say I don’t need them. But what about you?”
“I couldn’t wear but one pair of them, no matter how many I had,” the reporter said. “You better go ahead and try them on.”
“They’ll fit, all right. There are two garments that will fit anybody: a handkerchief when your nose is running and a pair of shoes when your feet are on the ground.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “That was the same ship that he and Laverne—”
“Yair. Jesus, they were a pair. She was glad to see him when he come into town that day in it. One day she told me something about it. She was an orphan, see; her older sister that was married sent for her to come live with them when her folks died. The sister was about twenty years older than Laverne and the sister’s husband was about six or eight years younger than the sister and Laverne was about fourteen or fifteen; she hadn’t had much fun at home with a couple of old people like her father and mother, and she never had much with her sister neither, being that much younger; yair, I don’t guess the sister had a whole lot of fun either with the kind of guy the husband seemed to be. So when the husband started teaching Laverne how to slip out and meet him and they would drive to some town forty or fifty miles away when the husband was supposed to be at work or something and he would buy her a glass of soda-water or maybe stop at a dive where the husband was sure nobody he knowed would see them and dance, I guess she thought that was all the fun there was in the world and that since he would tell her it was all right to twotime the sister that way, that it was all right for her to do the rest of it he wanted. Because he was the big guy, see, the one that paid for what she wore and what she ate. Or maybe she didn’t think it was all right so much as she just thought that that was the way it was — that you was either married and wore down with housework to where your husband was just the guy that twotimed you and you knew it and all you could do about it was nag at him while he was awake and go through his clothes while he was alseep to see if you found any hairpins or letters or rubbers in his pockets, and then cry and moan about him to your younger sister while he was gone; or you were the one that somebody else’s husband was easing out with and that all the choice you had was the dirty dishes to wash against the nickel sodas and a half an hour of dancing to a back-alley orchestra in a dive where nobody give his right name and then being wallowed around on the back seat of a car and then go home and slip in and lie to your sister and when it got too close, having the guy jump on you too to save his own face and then make it up by buying you two sodas next time. Or maybe at fifteen she just never saw any way of doing better because for awhile she never even knowed that the guy was holding her down himself, see, that he was hiding her out at the cheapdives not so they would not be recognized but so he would not have any competition from anybody but guys like himself; no young guys for her to see or to see her. Only the competition come; somehow she found out there was sodas that cost more than a dime and that all the music never had to be played in a back room with the shades down. Or maybe it was just him, because one night she had used him for a stalking horse and he hunted her down and the guy she was with this time finally had to beat him up and so he went back home and told the sister on her — —”
The reporter rose, quickly. Jiggs watched him go to the table and pour into the glass, splashing the liquor on to the table. “That’s right,” Jiggs said. “Take a good one.” The reporter lifted the glass, gulping, his throat filled with swallowing and the liquor cascading down his chin; Jiggs sprang up quickly too but the other passed him, running towards the window and on to the balcony where Jiggs, following, caught him by the arms as he lunged outwards and the liquor, hardly warmed, burst from his mouth. The cathedral clock struck the half-hour; the sound followed them back into the room and seemed to die away too, like the light, into the harsh, bright, savage zigzags of colour on the blanket-hung walls. “Let me get you some water,” Jiggs said. “You sit down now, and I will—”
“I’m all right now,” the reporter said. “You put on your shoes. That was half-past seven then.”
“Yair. But you better—”
“No. Sit down; I’ll pull your leggings for you.”
“You sure you feel like it?”
“Yes. I’m all right now.” They sat facing one another on the floor again as they had sat the first night, while the reporter took hold of the riveted strap of the right boot leg. Then he began to laugh. “You see, it got all mixed up,” he said, laughing, not loud yet. “It started out to be a tragedy. A good orthodox Italian tragedy. You know: one Florentine falls in love with another Florentine’s wife and he spends three acts fixing it up to put the bee on the second Florentine and so just as the curtain falls on the third act the Florentine and the wife crawl down the fire escape and you know that the second Florentine’s brother won’t catch them until daylight and they will be asleep in the monk’s bed in the monastery? But it went wrong. When he come climbing up to the window to tell her the horses was ready, she refused to speak to him. It turned into a comedy, see?” He looked at Jiggs, laughing, not laughing louder but just faster. “Here, fellow!” Jiggs said. “Here now! Quit it!”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “It’s not that funny. I’m trying to quit it. I’m trying to. But I can’t quit. See? See how I can’t quit?” he said, still holding to the strap, his face twisted with laughing, which as Jiggs looked, burst suddenly with drops of moisture running down the cadaverous grimace which for an instant Jiggs thought was sweat until he saw the reporter’s eyes.
It was after half-past seven; they would have to hurry now.
But they found a cab at once and they got the green light at once at Grandlieu Street even before the cab began to slow, shooting athwart the glare of neon, the pulse and glitter of electrics which bathed the idle slow Sunday pavement throng as it drifted from window to window beyond which the immaculate, the unbelievable wax men and women gazed back at them with expressions inscrutable and delphic. Then the palms in Saint Jules Avenue began to swim and flee past — the scabby picket posts, the sage dusters out of the old Southern country thought; the lighted clock in the station façade said six minutes to eight.
“They are probably already on the train,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “They’ll let you through the gate, though.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, taking up the toy aeroplane and the package which he had rewrapped. “Don’t you want to come inside?”
“I’ll just wait here,” the reporter said. He watched Jiggs e
nter the waiting-room and vanish. He could hear the announcer calling another train; moving towards the doors he could see passengers begin to rise and take up bags and bundles and move towards the numbered gates, though quite a few still remained for other trains. “But not long,” the reporter thought. “Because they can go home now”; thinking of all the names of places which railroads go to, fanning out from the River’s mouth to all of America; of the cold February names: Minnesota and Dakota and Michigan, the high ice-clad river reaches and the long dependable snow; “yair, home now, knowing that they have got almost a whole year before they will have to get drunk and celebrate the fact that they will have more than eleven months before they will have to wear masks and get drunk and blow horns again.”
Now the clock said two minutes to eight; they had probably got off the car to talk to Jiggs, perhaps standing now on the platform, smoking maybe; he could cross the waiting-room and doubtless even see them, standing beside the hissing train while the other passengers and the redcaps hurried past; she would carry the bundle and the magazines and the little boy would have the aeroplane already, probably performing wing-overs or vertical turns by hand. “Maybe I will go and look,” he thought, waiting to see if he would, until suddenly he realized that now it was different from when he had stood in the bedroom before turning on the light. It was himself now who was the nebulous and quiet ragtag and bobend of touching and breath and experience without visible scars, the waiting incurious unbreathing and without impatience, and there was another save him this time to make the move. There was a second hand on the clock too — a thin spidery splash; he watched it now as it moved too fast to follow save between the intervals of motion when it became instantaneously immobile as though drawn across the clock’s face by a pen and a ruler — 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. and done; it was now the twenty-first hour, and that was all. No sound, as though it had not been a steam train which quitted the station two seconds ago but rather the shadow of one on a magic-lantern screen until the child’s vagrant and restless hand came and removed the slide.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 194
