“And the committee wants to express here and now to you other pilots who were con——” Now he was interrupted by one of the men beside him:
“—and on behalf of Colonel Feinman.”
“Yes.—and on behalf of Colonel Feinman.—contemporaries and friends of Lieutenant Burnham, its sincere regret at last night’s unfortunate accident.”
“Yair,” the announcer said; he had not even looked toward the speaker, he just waited until he had got through. “So they—the committee—feel that they are advertising something they cant produce. They feel that Frank’s name should come off the program. I agree with them there and I know you will too.”
“Why not take it off, then?” one of the second group said.
“Yes,” the announcer said. “They are going to. But the only way they can do that is to have new programs printed, you see.” But they did not see yet. They just looked at him, waiting. The chairman cleared his throat, though at the moment there was nothing for him to interrupt.
“We had these programs printed for your benefit and convenience as contestants, as well as that of the spectators, without whom I dont have to remind you there would be no cash prizes for you to win. So you see, in a sense you contestants are the real benefactors of these printed programs. Not us; the schedule of these events can be neither information nor surprise to us, since we were privy to the arranging of them even if we are not to the winning—since we have been given to understand (and I may add, have seen for ourselves) that air racing has not yet reached the, ah, scientific heights of horse racing——” He cleared his throat again; a thin polite murmur of laughter rose from about the table and died away. “We had these programs printed at considerable expense, none of which devolved on you, yet they were planned and executed for your—I wont say profit, but convenience and benefit. We had them printed in good faith that what we guaranteed in them would be performed; we knew no more than you did that that unfortunate ac——”
“Yes,” the announcer said. “It’s like this. Somebody has got to pay to have new programs printed. These g—this.……they say w—the contestants and announcers and everybody drawing jack from the meet, should do it.” They did not make a sound, the still faces did not change expression; it was the announcer himself, speaking now in a tone urgent, almost pleading, where no dissent had been offered or intimated: “It’s just two and a half percent. We’re all in it; I’m in it too. Just two and a half percent.; when it comes out of prizemoney, like they say you wont notice it because you haven’t got it anyway until after the cut is taken out. Just two and a half percent., and——” The man in the second group spoke for the second time:
“Or else?” he said. The announcer did not answer. After a moment Shumann said,
“Is that all?”
“Yes,” the announcer said. Shumann rose.
“I better get back on my valves,” he said. Now when he and the jumper crossed the rotundra the crowd was trickling steadily through the gates. They worked into line and shuffled up to the gates too before they learned that they would have to have grandstand tickets to pass. So they turned and worked back out of the crowd and went out and around toward the hangar, walking now in a thin deep drone from somewhere up in the sun, though presently they could see them—a flight of army pursuit singleseaters circling the field in formation to land and then coming in, fast, bluntnosed, fiercelyraked, viciously powerful. “They’re over souped,” Shumann said. “They will kill you if you dont watch them. I wouldn’t want to do that for two-fifty-six a month.”
“You wouldn’t be cut two and a half percent. while you were out to lunch though,” the jumper said savagely. “What’s two and a half percent. of twenty-five bucks?”
“It aint the whole twenty-five,” Shumann said. “I hope Jiggs has got that supercharger ready to go back.” So they had almost reached the aeroplane before they discovered that it was the woman and not Jiggs at work on it and that she had put the supercharger back on with the engine head still off and the valves still out. She rose and brushed her hair back with the flat of her wrist, though they had asked no question.
“Yes,” she said. “I thought he was all right. I went out to eat and left him here.”
“Have you seen him since?” Shumann said. “Do you know where he is now?”
“What the hell does that matter?” the jumper said in a tense furious voice. “Let’s get the damned supercharger off and put the valves in.” He looked at the woman, furious, restrained. “What has this guy done to you? give you a dose of faith in mankind like he would syphilis or consumption or whatever it is, that will even make you trust Jiggs?”
“Come on,” Shumann said. “Let’s get the supercharger off. I guess he didn’t check the valve stems either, did he?”
“I dont know,” she said.
“Well, no matter. They lasted out yesterday. And we haven’t time now. But maybe we can get on the line by three if we dont stop to check them.” They were ready before that; they had the aeroplane on the apron and the engine running before three, and then the jumper who had worked in grim fury turned away, walking fast even though Shumann called after him. He went straight to where Jiggs and the reporter stood. He could not have known where to find them yet he went straight to them as though led by some blind instinct out of fury; he walked into Jiggs’ vision and struck him on the jaw so that the surprise the alarm and the shock were almost simultaneous, hitting him again before he finished falling and then whirled as the reporter caught his arm.
“Here! here!” the reporter cried. “He’s drunk! You cant hit a——” But the jumper didn’t say a word; the reporter saw the continuation of the turning become the blow of the fist. He didn’t feel the blow at all. “I’m too light to be knocked down or even hit hard,” he thought; he was still telling himself that while he was being raised up again and while the hands held him upright on his now boneless legs and while he looked at Jiggs sitting up now in a small stockade of legs and a policeman shaking him. “Hello, Leblanc,” the reporter said. The policeman looked at him now.
“So it’s you, hey?” the policeman said. “You got some news this time, aint you? Something to put in the paper that people will like to read. Reporter knocked down by irate victim, hey? That’s news.” He began to prod Jiggs with the side of his shoe. “Who’s this? Your substitute? Get up. On your feet now.”
“Wait,” the reporter said. “It’s all right. He wasn’t in it. He’s one of the mechanics here. An aviator.”
“I see,” the policeman said, hauling at Jiggs’ arm. “Aviator, hey? He dont look very high to me. Or maybe it was a cloud hit him in the jaw, hey?”
“Yes. He’s just drunk. I’ll be responsible; I tell you he wasn’t even in it; the guy hit him by mistake. Leave him be, Leblanc.”
“What do I want with him?” the policeman said. “So you’re responsible, are you? Get him up out of the street, then.” He turned and began to shove at the ring of people. “Go; beat it; get on, now,” he said. “The race is about to start. Go on, now.” So presently they were alone again, the reporter standing carefully, balancing, on his weightless legs (“Jesus,” he thought, “I’m glad now I am light enough to float”), feeling gingerly his jaw, thinking with peaceful astonishment, “I never felt it at all. Jesus, I didn’t think I was solid enough to be hit that hard but I must have been wrong.” He stooped, still gingerly, and began to pull at Jiggs’ arm until after a time Jiggs looked up at him blankly.
“Come on,” the reporter said. “Let’s get up.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Yair. Get up.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “Come on, now.” Jiggs rose slowly, the reporter steadying him; he stood blinking at the reporter.
“Jesus,” he said. “What happened?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “But it’s all right now. It’s all over now. Come on. Where do you want to go?” Jiggs moved, the reporter beside him, supporting him; suddenly Jiggs recoiled; looking up the reporter also saw the h
angar door a short distance away.
“Not there,” Jiggs said.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “We dont want to go there.” They turned; the reporter led the way now, working them clear again of the people passing toward the stands. He could feel his jaw beginning now, and looking back and upward he watched the aeroplanes come into position one by one as beneath them each dropping body bloomed into parachute. “And I never even heard the bomb,” he thought. “Or maybe that was what I thought hit me.” He looked at Jiggs walking stiffly beside him, as though the spring steel of his legs had been reft by enchantment of temper and were now mere dead iron. “Listen,” he said. He stopped and stopped Jiggs too, looking at him and speaking to him tediously and carefully as though Jiggs were a child. “I’ve got to go to town. To the paper. The boss sent for me to come in, see? Now you tell me where you want to go. You want to go somewhere and lie down a while? Maybe I can find a car where you can—”
“No,” Jiggs said. “I’m all right. Go on.”
“Yes. Sure. But you ought.……” Now all the parachutes were open; the sunny afternoon was filled with down-cupped blooms like inverted water hyacinths; the reporter shook Jiggs a little. “Come on, now. What’s next now? After the chute jumps?”
“What?” Jiggs said. “Next? What next?”
“Yes. What? Cant you remember?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Next.” For a full moment the reporter looked down at Jiggs with a faint lift of one side of his mouth as though favoring his jaw, not of concern nor regret nor even hopelessness so much as of faint and quizzical foreknowledge.
“Yes,” he said. He took the key from his pocket. “Can you remember this, then?” Jiggs looked at the key, blinking. Then he stopped blinking.
“Yair,” he said. “It was on the table right by the jug. And then we got hung up on the bastard laying there in the door and I let the door shut behind.……” He looked at the reporter, peering at him, blinking again. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Did you bring it too?”
“No,” the reporter said.
“Hell. Gimme the key; I will go and——”
“No,” the reporter said. He put the key back into his pocket and took out the change which the Italian had given him, the three quarters. “You said five dollars. But I haven’t got that much. This is all I have. But that will be all right because if it was a hundred it would be the same; it would not be enough because all I have never is, you see? Here.” He put the three quarters into Jiggs’ hand. For a moment Jiggs looked at his hand without moving. Then the hand closed; he looked at the reporter while his face seemed to collect, to become sentient.
“Yair,” he said. “Thanks. It’s o.k. You’ll get it back Saturday. We’re in the money now; Roger and Jack and the others struck this afternoon, see. Not for the money: for the principle of the thing, see?”
“Yes,” the reporter said. He turned and went on. Now he could feel his jaw quite distinctly through the faint grimace of smiling, the grimace thin bitter and wrung. “Yes. It aint the money. That aint it. That dont matter.” He heard the bomb this time and saw the five aeroplanes dart upward, diminishing, as he reached the apron, beginning to pass the spaced amplifyers and the rich voice:
“——second event. Three-seventy-five cubic inch class. Some of the same boys that gave you a good race yesterday, except Myers, who is out of this race to save up for the five-fifty later this afternoon. But Ott and Bullitt are out there, and Roger Shumann who surprised us all yesterday by taking second in a field that——” He found her almost at once; she had not changed from the dungarees this time. He extended the key, feeling his jaw plainer and plainer through his face’s grimace.
“Make yourselves at home,” he said. “As long as you want to. I’m going to be out of town for a few days. So I may not even see you again. But you can just drop the key in an envelope and address it to the paper. And make yourselves at home; there is a woman comes every morning but Sunday to clean up.……” The five aeroplanes came in on the first lap: the snarl, the roar banking into a series of downwind scuttering pops as each one turned the pylon and went on.
“You mean you’re not going to need the place yourself at all?” she said.
“No. I wont be there. I am going out of town on an assignment.”
“I see. Well, thanks. I wanted to thank you for last night, but——”
“Yair,” he said. “So I’ll beat it. You can say goodbye to the others for me.”
“Yes. But are you sure it wont——”
“Sure. It’s all right. You make yourselves at home.” He turned; he began to walk fast, thinking fast, “Now if I only can just——” He heard her call him twice; he thought of trying to run on his boneless legs and knew that he would fall, hearing her feet just behind him now, thinking, “No. No. Dont. That’s all I ask. No. No.” Then she was beside him; he stopped and turned, looking down at her.
“Listen,” she said. “We took some money out of your—”
“Yes. I knew. It’s o.k. You can hand it back. Put it in the envelope with the——”
“I intended to tell you as soon as I saw you today. It was——”
“Yair; sure.” He spoke loudly now, turning again, fleeing before yet beginning to move. “Anytime. Goodbye now.”
“——it was six-seventy. We left.……” Her voice died away; she stared at him, at the thin rigid grimace which could hardly have been called smiling but which could have been called nothing else. “How much did you find in your pocket this morning?”
“It was all there,” he said. “Just the six-seventy was missing. It was all right.” He began to walk. The aeroplanes came in and turned the field pylon again as he was passing through the gate and into the rotundra. When he entered the bar the first face he saw was that of the photographer whom he had called Jug.
“I aint going to offer you a drink,” the photographer said, “because I never buy them for nobody. I wouldn’t even buy Hagood one.”
“I dont want a drink,” the reporter said. “I just want a dime.”
“A dime? Hell, that’s damn near the same as a drink.”
“It’s to call Hagood with. That will look better on your expense account than a drink would.” There was a booth in the corner; he called the number from the slip which the substitute had given him. After a while Hagood answered. “Yair,
I’m out here,” the reporter said. “Yair, I feel o.k.……Yair, I want to come in. Take something else, another assignment.……Yair, out of town if you got anything, for a day or so if you——Yair. Thanks, chief. I’ll come right on in.” He had to walk through the voice again to pass through the rotundra, and again it met him outside though for the moment he did not listen to it for listening to himself: “It’s all the same! I did the same thing myself! I dont intend to pay Hagood either! I lied to him about money too!” and the answer, loud too: “You lie, you bastard. You’re lying, you son of a bitch.” So he was hearing the amplifyer before he knew that he was listening, just as he had stopped and half-turned before he knew that he had stopped, in the bright thin sunlight filled with mirageshapes which pulsed against his painful eyelids: so that when two uniformed policemen appeared suddenly from beyond the hangar with Jiggs struggling between them, his cap in one hand and one eye completely closed now and a long smear of blood on his jaw, the reporter did not even recognise him; he was now staring at the amplifyer above the door as though he were actually seeing in it what he merely heard:
“——Shumann’s in trouble; he’s out of the race; he’s turning out to.……He’s cut his switch and he’s going to land; I dont know what it is but he’s swinging wide; he’s trying to keep clear of the other ships and he’s pretty wide and that lake’s pretty wet to be out there without any motor——Come on, Roger; get back into the airport, guy!—He’s in now; he’s trying to get back onto the runway to land and it looks like he’ll make it all right but the sun is right in his eyes and he swung mighty wide to keep clear of——I don
t know about this——I dont.……Hold her head up, Roger! Hold her head up! Hold——” The reporter began to run; it was not the crash that he heard: it was a single long exhalation of human breath as though the microphone had reached out and caught that too out of all the air which people had ever breathed. He ran back through the rotundra and through the suddenly clamorous mob at the gate, already tugging out his policecard; it was as though all the faces, all the past twenty-four hours’ victories and defeats and hopes and renunciations and despairs, had been blasted completely out of his life as if they had actually been the random sheets of that organ to which he dedicated his days, caught momentarily upon one senseless member of the scarecrow which he resembled, and then blown away. A moment later, above the heads streaming up the apron and beyond the ambulance and the firetruck and the motorcycle squad rushing across the field, he saw the aeroplane lying on its back, the undercarriage projecting into the air rigid and delicate and motionless as the legs of a dead bird. Two hours later, at the bus stop on the Grandlieu Street corner, from where she and Shumann stood a few feet away, the woman could see the reporter standing quietly as he had emerged from the bus and surrendered the four tickets for which he had paid. She could not tell who or what he was looking at: his face was just peaceful, waiting, apparently inattentive even when the parachute jumper limped over to him, dragging savagely the leg which even through the cloth of the trousers appeared thick stiff and ungainly with the emergency dressing from the airport’s surgery, result of having been drifted by an unforeseen windgust over the stands and then slammed into one of the jerrybuilt refreshment booths when landing his parachute.
“Look here,” he said. “This afternoon. I was mad at Jiggs. I never meant to sock you. I was worried and mad. I even thought it was still Jiggs’ face until too late.”
“It’s all right,” the reporter said. It was not smiling: it was just peaceful and serene. “I guess I just got in the way.”