“Well,” Jiggs said, “I guess you’ll be wanting to get home and catch some shuteye.”
“Yair,” the reporter said, “we might as well be moving.” They got into the cab, though this time Jiggs lifted the canvas sack from the floor and sat with it on his lap.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “He’ll find it. He already dropped it a couple of times trying to make it spin on the platform. — You told him to stop at Main Street, didn’t you?”
“I’ll take you on to the hotel,” the reporter said.
“No, I’ll get out at Main. Jesus, it’s a good thing I don’t live here; I never would get back home unless somebody took me; I couldn’t even remember the name of the street I lived on even if I could pronounce it to ask where it was.”
“Grandlieu,” the reporter said. “I will take you—” The cab slowed into the corner and stopped; Jiggs gathered up the canvas bag and opened the door.
“This’ll be fine. It ain’t but eight-fifteen; I ain’t to meet Art until nine. I’ll just walk up the street a ways and get a little air.”
“I wish you’d let me — Or if you’d like to come on back home and—”
“No; you get on home and go to bed; we have kept you up enough, I guess.” He leaned into the cab, the cap raked above his hard blue face and the violent plum-coloured eye; suddenly the light changed to green and the bell clanged and shrilled. Jiggs stuck out his hand; for an instant the hot hard limp rough palm sweated against the reporter’s as if the reporter had touched a piece of machinery belting. “Much obliged. And thanks for the drinks. I’ll be seeing you.” The cab moved; Jiggs banged the door; his face fled backward past the window; the green and red and white electrics waned and pulsed and flicked away too as through the rear window the reporter watched Jiggs swing the now limp dirty sack over his shoulder and turn on into the crowd. The reporter leaned forward and tapped on the glass.
“Out to the airport,” he said.
“Airport?” the driver said. “I thought the other fellow said you wanted to go to Noyades Street.”
“No; airport,” the reporter said. The driver looked forward again; he seemed to settle himself, to shape his limbs for comfort for the long haul even while the one-way arrows of the old constricted city flicked past. But presently the old quarter gave way to out-ravelling and shabby purlieus, mostly lightless now, and the cab went faster; presently the street straightened and became the ribbon-straight road running across the terraqueous plain and the cab was going quite fast, and now the illusion began, the sense of being suspended in a small airtight glass box clinging by two puny fingers of light in the silent and rushing immensity of space. By looking back he could still see the city, the glare of it, no further away; if he were moving, regardless at what terrific speed and in what loneliness, so was it, paralleling him. He was not escaping it; symbolic and encompassing, it outlay all gasoline-spanned distances and all clock-or sun-stipulated destinations. It would be there — the eternal smell of the coffee the sugar the hemp sweating slow iron plates above the forked deliberate brown water and lost lost lost all ultimate blue of latitude and horizon; the hot rain gutterful plaiting the eaten heads of shrimp; the ten thousand inescapable mornings wherein ten thousand swinging airplants stippleprop the soft scrofulous soaring of sweating brick and ten thousand pairs of splayed brown hired Leonora feet tiger-barred by jaloused armistice with the invincible sun: the thin black coffee, the myriad fish stewed in a myriad oil — to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow; not only not to hope, not even to wait: just to endure.
The Scavengers
AT MIDNIGHT — one of the group of newspaper men on the beach claimed to have watched the mate of the dredge-boat and the sergeant of the police-launch holding flashlights on their watches for fifteen minutes... the dredge upped anchor and stood off shore and steamed away while the police-launch, faster, had taken its white bone almost beyond the sea-wall before the dredge had got enough offing to turn. Then the five newspaper men — four in overcoats with upturned collars — turned too and mounted the beach towards where the ranked glaring cars were beginning to disperse while the policemen — there were not so many of them now — tried to forestall the inevitable jam. There was no wind to-night, neither was there any overcast. The necklace of lights along the lake shore curved away faint and clear, with that illusion of tremulous wavering which distance and clarity gave them, like bright not-quite-settled roosting birds, as did the boundary lights along the seawall; and now the steady and measured rake of the beacon seemed not to travel so much as to murmur like a moving forefoot of wind across the water, among the thick faint stars. They mounted the beach to where a policeman, hands on hips, stood as though silhouetted not against the criss-crossing of headlights but against the blatting and honking uproar as well, as though contemplating without any emotion whatever the consummation of that which he had been waiting on for twenty hours now. “Ain’t you talking to us too, sergeant?” the first newspaper man said. The policeman looked back over his shoulder, squinting down at the group from under his raked cap.
“Who are you?” he said.
“We are the press,” the other said in a smirking affected voice.
“Get on, get on,” a second said behind him. “Let’s get indoors somewhere.” The policeman had already turned back to the cars, the racing engines, the honking and blatting.
“Come, come, sergeant,” the first said. “Come come come come. Ain’t you going to send us back to town too?” The policeman did not even look back. “Well, won’t you at least call my wife and tell her you won’t make me come home, since you wear the dark blue of honour integrity and purity—” The policeman spoke without turning his head.
“Do you want to finish this wake out here or do you really want to finish it in the wagon?”
“Exactly. You have got the idea at last. Boys, he’s even com—”
“Get on, get on,” the second said. “Let him buy a paper and read it.” They went on, the reporter (he was the one without an overcoat) last, threading their way between the blatting and honking, the whining and clashing of gears, the glare of back-bouncing and crossing headlight beams, and reached the boulevard and crossed it towards the lunch-stand. The first led the way in, his hat-brim crumpled on one side and his overcoat caught one button awry and a bottle neck protruding from one pocket. The proprietor looked up at them with no especial pleasure; he was about to close up.
“That fellow out there kept me up all last night and I am about wore out,” he said.
“You would think we were from the District Attorney’s office and trying to padlock him instead of a press delegation trying to persuade him to stay open and accept our pittances,” the first said. “You are going to miss the big show at daylight, let alone all the country trade that never heard about it until the noon train got in with the papers.”
“How about coming to the back room and letting me lock the door and turn out the lights up here, then?” the proprietor said.
“Sure,” they told him. So he locked up and turned off the lights and led them to the back, to the kitchen — a stove, a zinc table encrusted with week-end after week-end of slain meat and fish — and supplied them with glasses, bottles of coca cola, a deck of cards, beer-cases to sit on, and a barrel head for table, and prepared to retire.
“If anybody knocks, just sit quiet,” he said. “And you can beat on that wall there when they get ready to begin; I’ll wake up.”
“Sure,” they told him. He went out. The first opened the bottle and began to pour into the five glasses. The reporter stopped him.
“None for me. I’m not drinking.”
“What?” the first said. He set the bottle carefully down and took out his handkerchief and went through the pantomime of removing his glasses, polishing them, and replacing them and staring at the reporter, though before he had finished the fourth took up the bottle and finished pouring the drinks. “You what?” the first said. “Did I hear my ears, or was it just blind hope I heard?”<
br />
“Yes,” the reporter said; his face wore that faint, spent, aching expression which a man might wear towards the end of a private baby show, “I’ve quit for a while.”
“Thank God for that,” the first breathed, then he turned and began to scream at the one who now held the bottle, with that burlesque outrage and despair of the spontaneous amateur buffoon. But he ceased at once and then the four of them (again the reporter declined) sat about the barrel and began to deal blackjack. The reporter did not join them. He drew his beer-case aside, whereupon the first, the habitual opportunist who must depend upon all unrehearsed blundering and recalcitrant circumstance to be his stooge, noticed at once that he had set his beer-case beside the now cold stove. “If you ain’t going to take the drink yourself maybe you better give the stove one,” he said.
“I’ll begin to warm up in a minute,” the reporter said. They played; the fourth had the deal; their voices came quiet and brisk and impersonal above the faint slapping of the cards.
“That’s what I call a guy putting himself away for keeps,” he said.
“What do you suppose he was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for that water to smack him?” the first said.
“Nothing,” the second said shortly. “If he had been a man that thought, he would not have been up there in the first place.”
“Meaning he would have had a good job on a newspaper, huh?” the first said.
“Yes,” the second said. “That’s what I mean.” The reporter rose quietly. He lit a cigarette, his back turned a little to them, and dropped the match carefully into the cold stove and sat down again. None of the others appeared to have noticed him.
“While you are supposing,” the fourth said, “what do you suppose his wife was thinking about?”
“That’s easy,” the first said. “She was thinking, ‘Thank God I carry a spare.’” They did not laugh; the reporter heard no sound of laughter, sitting quiet and immobile on his beer-case while the cigarette smoke lifted in the unwinded stale air and broke about his face, streaming on, and the voices spoke back and forth with a sort of brisk dead slap-slap-slap like that of the cards.
“Do you suppose it’s a fact that they were both laying her?” the third said.
“That’s not news,” the first said. “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they don’t even know who the kid belongs to.”
“Maybe both,” the fourth said. “A dual personality: the flying Jekyll and Hyde brother, who flies the ship and makes the parachute jump all at once.”
The reporter did not move, only his hand, the arm bending at the elbow which rested upon his knee, rose with the cigarette to his mouth and became motionless again while he drew in the smoke with an outward aspect of intense bemused concentration, trembling quietly and steadily and apparently not only untroubled by it but not even aware of it, like a man who has had palsy for years and years; the voices might have indeed been the sound of the cards or perhaps leaves blowing past him.
“You bastards,” the second said. “You dirty-mouthed bastards. Why don’t you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us only maybe a little better than us. At least without squealing and belly-aching.”
“Sure,” the first said. “You get the point exactly. What they could do, with what they had to do it with: that’s just what we were talking about when you called us dirty-minded bastards.”
“Yes,” the third said. “Grady’s right. Let him rest; that’s what she seems to have done herself. But what the hell: probably nowhere to send him, even if she had him out of there. So it would be the same whether she stayed any longer or not, besides the cost. Where do you suppose they are going?”
“Where do people like that go?” the second said. “Where do mules and vaudeville acts go? You see a wagon broken down in the ditch or you see one of those trick bicycles with one wheel and the seat fourteen feet from the earth in a pawnshop. But do you wonder whatever became of whatever it was that used to make them move?”
“Do you mean you think she cleared out just to keep from having to pay out some jack to bury him if they get him up?” the fourth said.
“Why not?” the second said. “People like that don’t have money to spend on corpses because they don’t use money. It don’t take money especially to live; it’s only when you die that you or somebody has got to have something put away in the sock. A man can eat and sleep and keep the purity squad off of him for six months on what the undertaker will make you believe you can’t possibly be planted for a cent less and preserve your self-respect. So what would they have to bury him with even if they had him to bury?”
“You talk like he didn’t kill himself taking a chance to win two thousand dollars,” the third said.
“That’s correct. Oh, he would have taken the money, all right. But that wasn’t why he was flying that ship up there. He would have entered it if he hadn’t had anything but a bicycle, just so it would have got off the ground. But it ain’t for money.
It’s because they have got to do it, like some women have got to be whores. They can’t help themselves. Ord knew that the ship was dangerous, and Shumann must have known it as well as Ord did — don’t you remember how for the first lap he stayed so far away he didn’t even look like he was in the same race, until he forgot and came in and tried to catch Ord? If it had just been the money, do you think he could have thought about money hard enough to have decided to risk his life to get it in a machine that he knew was unsafe, and then have forgot about the money for a whole lap of the race while he hung back there not half as close to the pylons as the judges were, just riding around? Don’t kid yourself.”
“And don’t kid yourself,” the first said. “It was the money. Those guys like money as well as you and me. What would he have done with it? Hell, what would any other three people do with two thousand bucks? She would have bought herself a batch of new clothes and they would have moved to the hotel from wherever it was they were staying, and they would have taken a couple of days and blowed it out good. That’s what they would have done. But they didn’t get it and so you are right, by God: what she did was the sensible thing: when a game blows up in your face you don’t sit down on the pocket-book that used to make a bump on your ass and cry about it, you get out and hustle up another roll and go on and find another game that maybe you can beat. Yes. They want money, all right. But it ain’t to sweat just to have something in the sock when the snow flies, or to be buried with either. So I don’t know any more than you guys do, but if somebody told me that Shumann had some folks somewhere and then they told me the name of the town she bought hers and the kid’s tickets to, I would tell you where Shumann used to live. And then I would bet a quarter maybe that the next time you see them, the kid won’t be there. Because why? Because that’s what I would do if I were her. And so would you guys.”
“No,” the second said.
“You mean you wouldn’t or she wouldn’t?” the first said. The reporter satmotionless the cigarette’s windless upstream breaking upon his face. “Yes,” the first said. “Before, they might not have known whose the kid was, but it was Shumann’s name he went under and so in comparison to the whole mess they must have lived in, who had actually fathered the kid didn’t matter. But now Shumann’s gone; you asked a while ago what she was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for the water to hit him. I’ll tell you what she and the other guy were both thinking about: that now that Shumann was gone, they would never get rid of him. Maybe they took it night about: I don’t know. But now they couldn’t even get him out of the room; even turning off the light won’t do any good, and all the time they would be awake and moving there he will be, watching them right out of the mixed-up name, Jack Shumann, that the kid has. It used to be the guy had one competitor; now he will have to compete with every breath the kid draws an
d be cuckolded by every ghost that walks and refuses to give his name. So if you will tell me that Shumann has some folks in a certain town, I will tell you where she and the kid—” The reporter did not move. He sat quite still while the voice ceased on that note of abrupt transition, hearing out of the altered silence the voices talking at him and the eyes talking at him while he held himself rigid, watching the calculated hand flick the ash carefully from the cigarette. “You hung around them a lot,” the first said. “Did you ever hear any of them mention any kin that Shumann or she had?” The reporter did not move; he let the voice repeat the question; he even raised the cigarette again and flicked the ash off, or what would have been ash if he had not flicked it only a second ago. Then he started; he sat up, looking at them with an expression of startled interrogation.
“What?” he said. “What was that? I wasn’t listening.”
“Did you ever hear any mention of Shumann having any kinsfolks, mother and father and such?” the first said. The reporter’s face did not alter.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe I did. I believe his mechanic told me that he was an orphan.”
It was two o’clock then but the cab went fast, so it was just past two-thirty when the cab reached the Terrebonne and the reporter entered and leaned his gaunt desperate face across the desk while he spoke to the clerk. “Don’t you call yourselves the headquarters of the American Aeronautical Association?” he said. “You mean you didn’t keep any registration of contestants and such? that the committee just let them scatter to hell and gone over New Valois without—”
“Who is it you want to find?” the clerk said.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 195
