“What do you want to eat?” the waitress said.
“What do people eat for breakfast?” he said, looking at her—a porcelainfaced woman whose hair complexion and uniform appeared to have been made of various shades of that material which oldtime bookkeepers used to protect their sleeves with—and smiling: or he would have called it smiling. “That’s right. It aint breakfast now, is it?”
“What do you want to eat?”
“Roast beef,” his mind said at last. “Potatoes,” he said. “It dont matter.”
“Sandwich or lunch?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes what? You wanna order dont you wanna?”
“Sandwich,” he said.
“Mash one!” the waitress cried.
“And that’s that,” he thought, as though he had discharged the promise; as though by ordering, acquiescing to the idea, he had eaten the food too. “And then I will.……”
Only the hangar was not the mirage but the restaurant, the counter, the clash and clatter, the sound of food and of eating; it seemed to him that he could see the group: the aeroplane, the four dungaree figures, the little boy in dungarees too, himself approaching: I hope you found everything you wanted before you left? Yes, thank you. It was thirteen dollars. Just till Saturday—No matter; it dont matter; dont even think of it Now suddenly he heard the amplifyer too in the rotundra; it had been speaking for some time but he had just noticed it:
“——second day of the Feinman Airport dedication invitation meet held under the official rules of the American Aeronautical Association and through the courtesy of the city of New Valois and of Colonel H.I. Feinman, Chairman of the Sewage Board of New Valois. Events for the afternoon as follows——” He quit listening to it then, drawing from his pocket the pamphlet program of yesterday and opening it at the second fading imprint of the mimeograph:
Friday
2:30 P.M. Spot Parachute Jump. Purse $25.00
3:00 P.M. Scull Speed Dash. 375 cu. in. Qualifying speed 180 m.p.h. Purse $325.00 (1, 2, 3, 4)
3:30 P.M. Aerial Acrobatics. Jules Despleins, France. Lieut. Frank Burnham, United States.
4:30 P.M. Scull Speed Dash. 575 cu. in. Qualifying speed, 200 m.p.h. Purse $650.00 (1, 2, 3, 4)
5:00 P.M. Delayed Parachute Drop.
8:00 P.M. Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane. Lieut. Frank Burnham
He continued to look at the page long after the initial impact of optical surprise had faded. “That’s all,” he said. “That’s all she would have to do. Just tell me they.……It aint the money. She knows it aint that. It aint the money with me anymore than it is with them,” he said; the man had to speak to him twice before the reporter knew he was there. “Hello,” he said.
“So you got out here after all,” the other said. Behind the man stood another, a short man with a morose face, carrying a newspaper camera.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “Hi, Jug,” he said to the second man. The first looked at him, curiously.
“You look like you have been dragged through hell by the heels,” he said. “You going to cover this today too?”
“Not that I know of,” the reporter said. “I understand I am fired. Why?”
“I was about to ask you. Hagood phoned me at four this morning, out of bed. He told me to come out today and if you were not here, to cover it. But mostly to watch out for you if you came and to tell you to call him at this number.” He took a folded strip of paper from his vest and gave it to the reporter. “It’s the country club. He said to call him as soon as I found you.”
“Thanks,” the reporter said. But he did not move. The other looked at him.
“Well, what do you want to do? You want to cover it or you want me to?”
“No. I mean, yes. You take it. It dont matter. Jug knows better what Hagood wants than you or I either.”
“O.K.,” the other said. “Better call Hagood right away, though.”
“I will,” the reporter said. Now the food came: the heaped indestructible plate and the hand scrubbed, with vicious coral nails, the hand too looking like it had been conceived formed and baked in the kitchen, or perhaps back in town and sent out by light and speedy truck along with the scrolled squares of pastry beneath the plate glass counter; he looked at both the food and the hand from the crest of a wave of pure almost physical flight. “Jesus, sister,” he said, “I was joking with the wrong man, wasn’t I?” But he drank the coffee and ate some of the food; he seemed to watch himself creeping slowly and terrifically across the plate like a mole, blind to all else and deaf now even to the amplifyer; he ate a good deal of it, sweating, seeming to chew forever and ever before getting each mouthful in position to be swallowed. “I guess that’ll be enough,” he said at last. “Jesus, it will have to be,” he said. He was in the rotundra now and moving toward the gates into the stands before he remembered and turned and breasted the stream toward the entrance and so outside and into the bright soft hazy sunlight with its quality of having been recently taken out of water and not yet thoroughly dried and full of the people, the faces, the cars coming up and discharging and moving on. Across the plaza the hangar-wing seemed to sway and quiver like a grounded balloon. “But I feel better,” he thought. “I must. They would not have let me eat all that and not feel better because I cant possibly feel as bad as I still think I do.” He could hear the voice again now from the amplifyer above the entrance:
“——wish to announce that due to the tragic death of Lieutenant Frank Burnham last night, the airport race committee has discontinued the evening events.… The time is now one-forty-two. The first event on today’s program will.……” The reporter stopped.
“One-forty-two,” he thought. Now he could feel something which must have been the food he had just eaten beating slow and steady against his skull which up to this time had been empty, had hardly troubled him at all except for the sensation of being about to float off like one of the small balloons escaped from the hand of a child at a circus, trying to remember what hour the program had allotted to the three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch race, thinking that perhaps when he got into the shade he could bear to look at the program again. “Since it seems I am bound to offer her the chance to tell me that they stole.……not the money. It’s not the money. It’s not that.” Now the shade of the hangar fell upon him and he could see the program again, the faint mimeographed letters beating and pulsing against his cringing eyeballs and steadying at last so that he could read his watch. It would be an hour still before he could expect to find her alone. He turned and followed the hangarwall and passed beyond it. Across the way the parking-lot was almost full and there was another stream here, moving toward the bleachers, though he stood on the edge of it while his eyeballs still throbbed and watched the other fringe of them slowing and clotting before one of the temporary wooden refreshment booths which had sprung up about the borders of the airport property as the photographs of the pilots and machines had bloomed in the shopwindows downtown for some time before he began to realise that something besides the spectacle (still comparatively new) of outdoors drinking must be drawing them. Then he thought he recognised the voice and then he did recognise the raked filthy swagger of the cap and moved, pressing, filtering, on and into the crowd and so came between Jiggs’ drunken belligerent face and the Italian face of the booth’s proprietor who was leaning across the counter and shouting,
“Bastard, huh? You theenk bastard, hey?”
“What is it?” the reporter said. Jiggs turned and looked at him for a moment of hot blurred concentration without recognition; it was the Italian who answered.
“For me, nothing!” he shouted. “He come here, he have one drink, two drink; he no need either one of them but o.k.; he pay; that o.k. for me. Then he say he wait for friend, that he have one more drink to surprise friend. That not so good but my wife she give it to him and that maka three drink he dont need and I say, You pay and go, eh? Beat it. And he say, O.K., goodbye and I say Why you
no pay, eh? and he say That drink to surprise friend; looka like it surprise you too, eh? and I grab to hold and call policaman because I dont want for trouble with drunk and he say bastard to me before my wife——” Still Jiggs did not move. Even while holding himself upright by the counter he gave that illusion of tautly sprung steel set delicately on a hair trigger.
“Yair,” he said. “Three drinks, and just look what they done to me!” on a rising note which stopped before it became idiotic laughter; whereupon he stared again at the reporter with that blurred gravity, watching while the reporter took the second of the two dollar bills which the negress had loaned him and gave it to the Italian. “There you are, Columbus,” Jiggs said. “Yair. I told him. Jesus, I even tried to tell him your name, only I couldn’t remember it.” He looked at the reporter with hot intensity, like an astonished child. “Say, that guy last night told me your name. Is that it, sure enough? you swear to Christ, no kidding?”
“Yair,” the reporter said. He put his hand on Jiggs’ arm. “Come on. Let’s go.” The spectators had moved on now. Behind the counter the Italian and his wife seemed to pay them no more attention. “Come on,” the reporter said. “It must be after two. Let’s go help get the ship ready and then I’ll buy another drink.” But Jiggs did not move, and then the reporter found Jiggs watching him with something curious, calculating and intent, behind the hot eyes; they were not blurred now at all, and suddenly Jiggs stood erect before the reporter could steady him.
“I was looking for you,” Jiggs said.
“I came along at the right time, didn’t I, for once in my life. Come on. Let’s go to the hangar. I imagine they are waiting for you there. Then I will buy a——”
“I dont mean that,” Jiggs said. “I was kidding the guy. I had the quarter, all right. I’ve had all I want. Come on.” He led the way, walking a little carefully yet still with the light springlike steps, bumping and butting through the gateward stream of people, the reporter following, until they were beyond it and clear; anyone who approached them now would have to do so deliberately and should have been visible a hundred yards away, though neither of them saw the parachute jumper who was doing just that.
“You mean the ship’s all ready?” the reporter said.
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Roger and Jack aint even there. They have gone to the meeting.”
“Meeting?”
“Sure. Contestants’ meeting. To strike, see? But listen—”
“To strike?”
“Sure. For more jack. It aint the money: it’s the principle of the thing. Jesus, what do we need with money?” Jiggs began to laugh again on that harsh note which stopped just as it became laughing and started before it was mirth. “But that aint it. I was looking for you.” Again the reporter looked at the hot unreadable eyes. “Laverne sent me. She said to give me five dollars for her.” The reporter’s face did not change at all. Neither did Jiggs’: the hot impenetrable eyes, the membrane and fiber netting and webbing the unrecking and the undismayed. “Roger was in the money yesterday; you’ll get it back Saturday. Only if it was me, I wouldn’t even wait for that. Just let her underwrite you, see?”
“Underwrite me?”
“Sure. Then you wouldn’t even have to bother to put anything back into your pocket. All you would have to do would be to button up your pants.” Still the reporter’s face did not change, his voice did not change, not loud, without amazement, anything.
“Do you reckon I could?”
“I dont know,” Jiggs said. “Didn’t you ever try it? It’s done every night somewhere, so I hear. Probably done right here in New Valois, even. And if you cant, she can show you how.” The reporter’s face did not change; he was just looking at Jiggs and then suddenly Jiggs moved, sudden and complete; the reporter saw the hot secret eyes come violently alive and, turning, the reporter also saw the parachute jumper’s face. That was a little after two oclock; Shumann and the jumper had been in the Superintendent’s office from twelve until fifteen to one. They passed through the same discreet door which Jiggs had used the afternoon before and went on through the anteroom and into a place like a board room in a bank—a long table with a row of comfortable chairs behind it, in which perhaps a dozen men who might have been found about any such table back in town sat, and another group of chairs made out of steel and painted to resemble wood, in which with a curious gravity something like that of the older and better behaved boys in a reform school on Christmas eve, sat the other men who by ordinary at this hour would have been working over the aeroplanes in the hangar—the pilots and parachute jumpers, in greasy dungarees or leather jackets almost as foul, the quiet sober faces looking back as Shumann and the jumper entered. Just as the blue serge of last night was absent, so were the tweed coats and the ribbon badges with one exception. This was the microphone’s personified voice. He sat with neither group, his chair that which should have been at the end of the table but which he had drawn several feet away as though preparing to tip it back against the wall. But he was as grave as either group; the scene was exactly that of the conventional conference between the millowners and the delegation from the shops, the announcer representing the labor lawyer—that man who was once a laborer himself but from whose hands now the callouses have softened and whitened away so that, save for something nameless and ineradicable—a quality incorrigibly dissentive and perhaps even bizarre—about his clothing which distinguishes him forever from the men behind the table as well as from the men before it as the badge of the labor organization in his lapel establishes him forever as one of them, he might actually sit behind the table too. But he did not. But the very slightness of the distance between him and the table postulated a gap more unbridgable even than that between the table and the second group, as if he had been stopped in the midst of a violent movement, if not of protest at least of dissent, by the entrance into the room of the men in whose absent names he dissented. He nodded to Shumann and the jumper as they found chairs, then he turned to the thickfaced man at the center of the table.
“They’re all here now,” he said. The men behind the table murmured to one another.
“We must wait for him,” the thickfaced man said. He raised his voice. “We are waiting for Colonel Feinman, men,” he said. He took a watch from his vest; three or four others looked at their watches. “He instructed us to have everyone present at twelve oclock. He has been delayed. You can smoke, if you like.” Some of the second group began to smoke, passing lighted matches, speaking quietly like a school class which has been told that it can talk for a moment:
“What is it?”
“I dont know. Maybe something about Burnham.”
“Oh, yair. Probably that’s it.”
“Hell, they dont need all of us to——”
“Say, what do you suppose happened?”
“Blinded, probably.”
“Yair. Blinded.”
“Yair. Probably couldn’t read his altimeter at all. Or maybe forgot to watch it. Flew it right into the ground.”
“Yair. Jesus, I remember one time I was.……” They smoked. Sometimes they held the cigarettes like dynamite caps so as not to spill the ash, looking quietly about the clean new floor; sometimes they spilled the ashes discreetly down their legs. But finally the stubs were too short to hold. One of them rose; the whole room watched him cross to the table and take up an ashtray made to resemble a radial engine and bring it back and start it passing along the three rows of chairs like a church collection plate. Shumann looked at his watch and it was twenty-five minutes past twelve. He spoke quietly, to the announcer, as though they were alone in the room:
“Listen, Hank. I’ve got all my valves out. I have got to put the micrometer on them before I——”
“Yair,” the announcer said. He turned to the table. “Listen,” he said. “They are all here now. And they have got to get the ships ready for the race at three; Mr Shumann there has got all his valves out. So cant you tell them without waiting for F——Colonel Feinman? T
hey will agree, all right. I told you that. There aint anything else they can—I mean they will agree.”
“Agree to what?” the man beside Shumann said. But the chairman, the thickfaced man, was already speaking.
“Colonel Feinman said——”
“Yair.” The announcer spoke patiently. “But these boys have got to get their ships ready. We’ve got to be ready to give these people that are buying the tickets out there something to look at.” The men behind the table murmured again, the others watching them quietly.
“Of course we can take a straw vote now,” the chairman said. Now he looked at them and cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, the committee representing the business men of New Valois who have sponsored this meet and offered you the opportunity to win these cash prizes——” The announcer turned to him.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell them.” He turned now to the grave almost identical faces of the men in the hard chairs; he spoke quietly too. “It’s about the programs. The printed ones—you know. With the setup for each day. They were all printed last week and so they have still got Frank’s name on them——” The chairman interrupted him now: