“We’ll eat first,” Shumann said. “You wait.”
“I aint hungry,” Jiggs said. “I’ll eat later. I want to get started——”
“No,” the woman said; “Roger, dont——”
“Come on and eat some breakfast,” Shumann said. It seemed to Jiggs that he stood a long time in the bright hazy sunlight with his jaws and the shape of his mouth aching a little, but it was not long probably, and anyway his voice seemed to sound all right too.
“O.K.,” he said. “Let’s go. They aint my valves. I aint going to have to ride behind them at three oclock this afternoon.” The rotundra was empty, the restaurant empty too save for themselves. “I just want some coffee,” he said.
“Eat some breakfast,” Shumann said. “Come on, now.”
“I aint any hungrier now than I was out there by that lamppost two minutes ago,” Jiggs said. But his voice was still all right. “I just said I would come in, see,” he said. “I never said I would eat, see.” Shumann watched him bleakly.
“Listen,” he said. “You have had—was it two or three drinks this morning? Eat something. And tonight I will see that you have a couple or three drinks if you want. You can even get tight if you want. But now let’s get those valves out.” Jiggs sat perfectly still, looking at his hands on the table and then at the waitress’ arm propped beside him with waiting, wristnestled by four woolworth bracelets, the fingernails five spots of crimson glitter as if they had been bought and clipped onto the fingerends too.
“All right,” he said. “Listen too. What do you want? A guy with two or three drinks in him helping you pull valves, or a guy with a gut full of food on top of the drinks, asleep in a corner somewhere? Just tell me what you want, see? I’ll see you get it. Because listen. I just want coffee. I aint even telling you; I’m just asking you. Jesus, would please do any good?”
“All right,” Shumann said. “Just three breakfasts then,” he said to the waitress. “And two extra coffees.——Damn Jack,” he said. “He ought to eat too.”
“We’ll find him at the hangar,” Jiggs said. They found him there, though not at once; when Shumann and Jiggs emerged from the toolroom in their dungarees and waited outside the chickenwire door for the woman to change and join them, they saw first five or six other dungaree figures gathered about a sandwich board which had not been there yesterday, set in the exact center of the hangar entrance—a big board lettered heavily by hand and possessing a quality cryptic and peremptory and for the time incomprehensible as though the amplifyer had spoken the words:
NOTICE
All contestants, all pilots and parachute jumpers and all others eligible to win cash prizes during this meet, are requested to meet in Superintendent’s office at 12 noon today. All absentees will be considered to acquiesce and submit to the action and discretion of the race committee.
The others watched quietly while Shumann and the woman read it.
“Submit to what?” one of the others said. “What is it? Do you know?”
“I dont know,” Shumann said. “Is Jack Holmes on the field yet? Has anybody seen him this morning?”
“There he is,” Jiggs said. “Over at the ship, like I told you.” Shumann looked across the hangar. “He’s already got the cowling off. See?”
“Yair,” Shumann said. He moved at once. Jiggs spoke to the man beside whom he stood, almost without moving his lips:
“Lend me half a buck,” he said. “I’ll hand it back tonight. Quick.” He took the coin; he snatched it; when Shumann reached the aeroplane Jiggs was right behind him. The jumper, crouched beneath the engine, looked up at them, briefly and without stopping, as he might have glanced up at the shadow of a passing cloud.
“You had some breakfast?” Shumann said.
“Yes,” the jumper said, not looking up again.
“On what?” Shumann said. The other did not seem to have heard. Shumann took the money from his pocket—the remaining dollar bill, three quarters and some nickels, and laid two of the quarters on the engine mount at the jumper’s elbow. “Go and get some coffee,” he said. The other did not seem to hear, busy beneath the engine. Shumann stood watching the back of his head. Then the jumper’s elbow struck the engine mount. The coins rang on the concrete floor and Jiggs stooped, ducking, and rose again, extending the coins before Shumann could speak or move.
“There they are,” Jiggs said, not loud; he could not have been heard ten feet away: the fierceness, the triumph. “There you are. Count them. Count both sides so you will be sure.” After that they did not talk anymore. They worked quiet and fast, like a circus team, with the trained team’s economy of motion, while the woman passed them the tools as needed; they did not even have to speak to her, to name the tool. It was easy now, like in the bus; all he had to do was to wait as the valves came out one by one and grew in a long neat line on the workbench and then, sure enough, it came.
“It must be nearly twelve,” the woman said. Shumann finished what he was doing. Then he looked at his watch and stood up, flexing his back and legs. He looked at the jumper.
“You ready?” he said.
“You are not going to wash up and change?” the woman said.
“I guess not,” Shumann said. “It will be that much more time wasted.” He took the money again from his pocket and gave the woman the three quarters. “You and Jiggs can get a bite when Jiggs gets the rest of the valves out. And, say—” he looked at Jiggs “—dont bother about trying to put the micrometer on them yourself. I’ll do that when I get back. You can clean out the supercharger; that ought to hold you until we get back.” He looked at Jiggs. “You ought to be hungry now.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He had not stopped; he did not watch them go out. He just squatted beneath the engine with the spraddled tenseness of an umbrellarib, feeling the woman looking at the back of his head. He spoke now without fury, without triumph, to himself: without sound: “Yair, beat it. You cant stop me. You couldn’t stop me but for a minute even if you tried to hold me between your legs.” He was not thinking of the woman as Laverne, as anyone: she was just the last and now swiftlyfading residuum of the it, the they, watching the back of his head as he removed the supercharger without even knowing that she was already defeated.
“Do you want to eat now?” she said. He didn’t answer. “Do you want me to bring you a sandwich?” He didn’t answer. “Jiggs,” she said. He looked up and back, his eyebrows rising and vanishing beyond the cap’s peak, the hot bright eyes blank, interrogatory, arrested.
“What? How was that?” he said. “Did you call me?”
“Yes. Do you want to go and eat now or do you want me to bring you something?”
“No. I aint hungry yet. I want to get done with this supercharger before I wash my hands. You go on.” But she didn’t move yet; she stood looking at him.
“I’ll leave you some money and you can go when you are ready, then.”
“Money?” he said. “What do I need with money up to my elbows in this engine?” She turned away then. He watched her pause and call the little boy, who came out of a group across the hangar and joined her; they went on toward the apron and disappeared. Then Jiggs rose; he laid the tool down carefully, touching the coin in his pocket through the cloth, though he did not need to since he had never ceased to feel it; he was not thinking about her, not talking to her; he spoke without triumph or exultation, quietly: “Goodbye, you snooping bitch,” he said.
But they had not been able to tell if the reporter had seen them or not, though he probably could neither see nor hear; certainly the thin youngish lightcolored negress who came up the alley about half past nine, in a modish though not new hat and coat and carrying a wicker marketbasket covered neatly with a clean napkin, decided almost immediately that he could not. She looked down at him for perhaps ten seconds with complete and impersonal speculation, then she waggled one hand before his face and called him by name: and when she reached into his pockets she did not move or shift his body at all; her hand rea
ched in and drew out the two folded bills where Jiggs had put them with a single motion limber and boneless and softly rapacious as that of an octopus, then the hand made a second limber swift motion, inside her coat now, and emerged empty. It was her racial and sex’s nature to have taken but one of the bills, no matter how many there might have been—either the five or the one, depending upon her own need or desire of the moment or upon the situation itself—but now she took them both and stood again, looking down at the man in the doorway with a kind of grim though still impersonal sanctimoniousness. “If he found any of hit left hit wouldn’t learn him no lesson,” she said, aloud. “Laying out here in the street, drunk. Aint no telling where he been at, but hit couldn’t a been much for them to let him git back out and that much money in his pocket.” She took a key from somewhere beneath the coat and unlocked the door and caught him back in her turn as he began to tumble slowly and deliberately into the corridor, and entered herself. She was not gone long and now she carried the dishpan of dirty water, which she flung suddenly into his face and caught him again as he gasped and started. “I hopes you had sense enough to left your pocketbook in the house fo you decided to take a nap out here,” she cried, shaking him. “If you didn’t, I bound all you got left now is the pocketbook.” She carried him up the cramped stairs almost bodily, like that much firehose, and left him apparently unconscious again on the cot and went beyond the curtain and looked once with a perfectly inscrutable face at the neat bed which but one glance told her was not her handiwork. From the basket she took an apron and a bright handkerchief; when she returned to the reporter she wore the apron and the handkerchief about her head in place of the hat and coat, and she carried the dishpan filled now with fresh water, and soap and towels; she had done this before too, apparently, stripping the fouled shirt from the man who was her employer for this half hour of the six weekdays, and both washing him off and slapping him awake during the process until he could see and hear again. “It’s past ten oclock,” she said. “I done lit the gas so you can shave.”
“Shave?” he said. “Didn’t you know? I dont have to ever shave again. I’m fired.”
“The more reason for you to git up from here and try to look like something.” His hair, soaked, was plastered to his skull, yet it fitted no closer to the bones and ridges and joints than the flesh of his face did, and now his eyes did indeed look like holes burned with a poker in a parchment diploma, some postgraduate certificate of excess; naked from the waist up, it seemed as if you not only saw his ribs front and side and rear but that you saw the entire ribcage complete from any angle like you can see both warp and woof of screen wire from either side. He swayed laxly beneath her limber soft and ungentle hands, articulate and even collected though moving for a while yet in the twilight between the delusion of drunkenness and the delusion of sobriety.
“Are they gone?” he said. The negress’ face and manner did not change at all.
“Is who gone?” she said.
“Yair,” he said, drowsily. “She was here last night. She slept yonder in the bed last night. There was just one of them slept with her and there could have been both of them. But she was here. And it was him himself that wouldn’t let her drink, that took the glass out of her hand. Yair. I could hear all the long soft waiting sound of all womanmeat in bed beyond the curtain.” At first, for the moment, the negress did not even realise what it was touching her thigh until she looked down and saw the sticklike arm, the brittle light and apparently senseless hand like a bundle of dried twigs too, blundering and fumbling stiffly at her while in the gaunt eyesockets the eyes looked like two spots of dying daylight caught by water at the bottom of abandoned wells. The negress did not become coy nor outraged; she avoided the apparently blind or possibly just still insensible hand with a single supple shift of her hips, speaking to him, calling him by name, pronouncing the m.i.s.t.e.r. in full, in the flat lingering way of negroes, like it had two sets of two or three syllables each.
“Now then,” she said, “if you feel like doing something yourself, take a holt of this towel. Or see how much of whatever money you think you had folks is left you, besides leaving you asleep on the street.”
“Money?” he said. He waked completely now, his mind did, though even yet his hands fumbled for a while before finding the pocket while the negress watched him, standing now with her hands on her hips. She said nothing else, she just watched his quiet bemused and intent face as he plumbed his empty pockets one by one. She did not mention company again; it was he who cried, “I was out there, asleep in the alley. You know that, you found me. I left here, I was out there asleep because I forgot the key and I couldn’t get in again; I was out there a long time even before daylight. You know I was.” Still she said nothing, watching him. “I remember just when I quit remembering!”
“How much did you have when you quit remembering?”
“Nothing!” he said. “Nothing. I spent it all. See?” When he got up she offered to help him back to the bedroom, but he refused. He walked unsteadily still, but well enough, and when after a time she followed him she could hear him through the beaverboard wall of the alcove somewhat larger than a clothescloset and which she entered too and set water to heat on the gas plate beside which he was shaving, and prepared to make coffee. She gave the undisturbed bedroom another cold inscrutable look and returned to the front room and restored the tumbled cot, spreading the blanket and the pillows and picked up the soiled shirt and the towel from the floor and paused, laying the shirt on the couch but still carrying the towel, and went to the table and looked at the jug now with that bemused inscrutable expression. She wiped one of the sticky glasses with finicking care and poured into it from the jug almost what a thimble would have held and drank it, the smallest finger of that hand crooked delicately, in a series of birdlike and apparently extremely distasteful sips. Then she gathered up what she could conveniently carry of the night’s misplaced litter and returned beyond the curtain, though when she went to where she had set the basket on the floor against the wall with the hat and coat lying upon it, you could not hear her cross the floor at all nor stoop and take from the basket an empty pint bottle sparklingly clean as a sterilised milkbottle. By ordinary she would not have filled the flask at any single establishment of her morning round, on the contrary filling the bottle little by little with a sort of niggard and foresighted husbandry and arriving at home in midafternoon with a pint of liquid weird, potent, anonymous and strange, but once more she seemed to find the situation its own warrant, returning and putting the filled flask back into the basket still without any sound. The reporter heard only the broom for a time, and other muted sounds as though the room were putting itself to rights by means of some ghostly and invisible power of its own, until she came at last to the alcove’s doorway, where he stood tying his tie, with the hat and coat on again and the basket beneath its neat napkin again on her arm.
“I’m through,” she said. “The coffee’s ready, but you better not waste no time over drinking hit.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll have to make another loan from you.”
“You wont need but a dime to get to the paper. Aint you got even that much left?”
“I aint going to the paper. I’m fired, I tell you. I want two dollars.”
“I has to work for my money. Last time I lent you hit took you three weeks to start paying me back.”
“I know. But I have to have it. Come on, Leonora. I’ll pay you back Saturday.” She reached inside her coat; one of the bills was his own.
“The key’s on the table,” she said. “I washed hit off too.” It lay there, on the table clean and empty save for the key; he took it up and mused upon it with that face which the few hours of violent excess had altered from that of one brightly and peacefully dead to that of one coming back from, or looking out of, hell itself.
“But it’s all right,” he said. “It dont matter. It aint anything.” He stood in the clean empty room where there was not even a cigar
ettestub or a burned match to show any trace. “Yair. She didn’t even leave a hair pin,” he thought. “Or maybe she dont use them. Or maybe I was drunk and they were not even here”; looking down at the key with a grimace faint and tragic which might have been called smiling while he talked to himself, giving himself the advice which he knew he was not going to take when he insisted on borrowing the two dollars. “Because I had thirty before I spent the eleven-eighty and then the five for the absinth. That left about thirteen.” Then he cried, not loud, not moving: “Besides, maybe she will tell me. Maybe she intended to all the time but they couldn’t wait for me to come to,” without even bothering to tell himself that he knew he was lying, just saying quietly and stubbornly, “All right. But I’m going anyway. Even if I dont do anything but walk up where she can see me and stand there for a minute.” He held the key in his hand now while the door clicked behind him, standing for a moment longer with his eyes shut against the impact of light, of the thin sun, and then opening them, steadying himself against the doorframe where he had slept, remembering the coffee which the negress had made and he had forgot about until now, while the alley swam away into mirageshapes, tilting like the sea or say the lakesurface, against which the ordeal of destination, of hope and dread, shaped among the outraged nerves of vision the bright vague pavilionglitter beneath the whipping purple-and-gold pennons. “It’s all right,” he said. “It aint nothing but money. It dont matter.” It was not two when he reached the airport, but already the parking lots along the boulevard were filling, with the young men paid doubtless out of some wearily initialled national fund, in the purple-and-gold caps lent or perhaps compulsory, clinging to runningboards, moving head-and-shoulders above the continuous topline of alreadyparked cars as though they consisted of torsos alone and ran on wires for no purpose and toward no discernible destination. A steady stream of people flowed along the concrete gutters, converging toward the entrances, but the reporter did not follow. To the left was the hangar where they would be now, but he did not go there either; he just stood in the bright hazy damp-filled sunlight, with the pennons whipping stiffly overhead and the wind which blew them seeming to blow through him too, not cold, not unpleasant: just whipping his clothing about him as if it blew unimpeded save by the garment, through his ribcage and among his bones. “I ought to eat,” he thought. “I ought to,” not moving yet as though he hung static in a promise made to someone which he did not believe even yet that he was going to break. The restaurant was not far; already it seemed to him that he could hear the clash and clatter and the voices and smell the food, thinking of the three of them yesterday while the little boy burrowed with flagging determination into the second plate of icecream. Then he could hear the sounds, the noise, and smell the food itself as he stood looking at the table where they had sat yesterday, where a family group from a grandmother to an infant in arms now sat. He went to the counter. “Breakfast,” he said.