Pylon

  “We’ll need the cab to get around Grandlieu,” the reporter said. “I wont be long.” He walked into no reflection now, since darkness was behind him; the doors swung to. The elevator door was slightly ajar and he could see the stack of papers beneath the facedown watch and he could smell the stinking pipe but he did not pause, taking the steps two at a time, and on into the cityroom; beneath his green eyeshade Hagood looked up and saw the reporter. But this time the reporter neither sat down nor removed his hat: he stood, loomed, into the green diffusion above the desklamp, looking down at Hagood with gaunt and quiet immobility as though he had been blown for a second against the desk by a wind and would in another second be blown onward once more.

  “Go home and go to bed,” Hagood said. “The story you phoned in is already set up.”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I must have fifty dollars, chief.” After a while Hagood said,

  “Must, do you?” He did not move at all. “Must, eh?” he said. The reporter did not move either.

  “I cant help it. I know that I.……yesterday, whenever it was. When I thought I was fired. I got the message, all right. I ran into Cooper about noon and I didn’t call you until after three. And I didn’t report in here, like I said. But I did phone in the story; I will come back in about an hour and clean it.……But I got to have fifty dollars.”

  “It’s because you know I wont fire you,” Hagood said. “Is that it?” The reporter said nothing. “All right. Come on. What is it this time? I know, all right. But I want to hear it from you—or are you still married or moved away or dead?” The reporter did not move; he spoke quietly, apparently into the green lampshade like it was a microphone:

  “The cops got him. It happened just about the time Shumann nosed over, and so I.……So he’s in the can. And

  they will need some jack too until Shumann gets his money tomorrow night.”

  “So,” Hagood said. He looked up at the still face above him which for the time had that calm sightless contemplation of a statue. “Why dont you let these people alone?” he said. Now the blank eyes waked; the reporter looked at Hagood for a full minute. His voice was as quiet as Hagood’s.

  “I cant,” he said.

  “You cant?” Hagood said. “Did you ever try to?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said in his dead flat voice, looking at the lamp again; that is, Hagood knew that the reporter was not looking at him. “I tried.” After a moment Hagood turned, heavily. His coat hung on the back of his chair. He took his wallet from it and counted fifty dollars onto the desk and pushed it over to the reporter and saw the bony, clawlike hand come into the lamp’s glare and take up the money. “Do you want me to sign anything now?” the reporter said.

  “No,” Hagood said without looking up. “Go home and go to bed. That’s all I want.”

  “I’ll come in later and clean up the story.”

  “It’s already in galley,” Hagood said. “You go home.” The reporter moved away from the desk quietly enough, but as he entered the corridor it was as though the wind which had blown him against Hagood’s desk and left him there had now begun to blow him again; he was passing the elevator shaft toward the stairs with only a glance at it when the door clashed back and someone got out, whereupon he turned and entered, reaching with one hand into his pocket as with the other he lifted the top paper beneath the sliding facedown watch. But he did not even glance at it now; he thrust it, folded, into his pocket as the cage stopped and the door clashed open.

  “Well, I see where another of them tried to make a headline out of himself this afternoon,” the elevator man said.

  “Is that so?” the reporter said. “Better close that door; I think you got a draft in there.” He ran into the swinging reflection in the glass doors this time, on his long loose legs, with the long loose body which had had no food since noon and little enough before that but which, weightless anyway, had the less to carry now. Shumann opened the cab door for him. “Bayou Street police station,” the reporter told the driver. “Make it snappy.”

  “We could walk,” Shumann said.

  “Hell, I got fifty bucks now,” the reporter said. They traveled crosstown now; the cab could rush fast down each block of the continuous alley, pausing only at the intersections where, to the right, canyonniched, the rumor of Grandlieu Street swelled and then faded in repetitive and indistinguishable turmoil, flicking on and past as though the cab ran along the rimless periphery of a ghostly wheel spoked with light and sound. “Yair,” the reporter said, “I reckon they took Jiggs to the only quiet place in New Valois for a man to sober up in. He’ll be sober now.” He was sober; a turnkey fetched him in to where the reporter and Shumann waited at the desk. His eye was closed now and his lip swollen though the blood had been cleaned away except where it had dried on his shirt.

  “Got enough for a while?” Shumann said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Give me a cigarette, for God’s sake.” The reporter gave him the cigarette and held the match while Jiggs tried to bring the cigarette into the flame, jerking and twitching until at last the reporter grasped Jiggs’ hand and steadied it to make the contact.

  “We’ll get a piece of steak and put it on your eye,” the reporter said.

  “You better put it inside of him,” the desk man said.

  “How about that?” the reporter said. “You want to eat?” Jiggs held the cigarette in both shaking hands.

  “All right,” Jiggs said.

  “What?” the reporter said. “Would you feel better if you ate something?”

  “All right,” Jiggs said. “Do we go now or do I go back in there?”

  “No, we’re going right now,” the reporter said. He said to Shumann, “You take him on to the cab; I’ll be right out.” He turned to the desk. “What’s it, Mac? Drunk or vag?”

  “You springing him, or the paper?”

  “I am.”

  “Call it vag,” the desk man said. The reporter took out Hagood’s money and laid ten dollars on the desk.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Will you give the other five to Leblanc? I borrowed it off of him out at the airport this afternoon.” He went out too. Shumann and Jiggs waited beside the cab. The reporter saw now the once raked and swaggering cap crumpled and thrust into Jiggs’ hip pocket and that the absence of the raked and filthy object from Jiggs’ silhouette was like the dropped flag from the shot buck’s—the body still ran, still retained a similitude of power and even speed, would even run on for yards and even perhaps miles, and then for years in a gnawing burrowing of worms, but that which tasted air and drank the sun was dead. “The poor bastard,” the reporter thought; he still carried the mass of bills as he had thrust them into and withdrawn them from his pocket. “You’re o.k. now,” he said, loudly, heartily. “Roger can stop somewhere and get you something to eat and then you will be all right. Here.” He nudged his hand at Shumann.

  “I wont need it,” Shumann said. “Jack collected his eighteen-fifty for the jump this afternoon.”

  “Yair; I forgot,” the reporter said. Then he said, “But what about tomorrow? We’ll be gone all day, see? Here, take it; you can leave it with her in case.……You can just keep it and pay it all back, then.”

  “Yair,” Shumann said. “Thanks then.” He took the crumpled wad without looking at it and put it into his pocket and pushed Jiggs into the cab.

  “Besides, you can pay the cab, too,” the reporter said. “We forgot about that.—I told him where to go. See you in the morning.” He leaned to the window; beyond Shumann Jiggs sat in the other corner, smoking the cigarette out of both shaking hands. The reporter spoke in a tone repressed, conspiratorial: “Train leaves at eight-twenty-two. O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” Shumann said.

  “I’ll have everything fixed up and meet you at the station.”

  “O.K.,” Shumann said. The cab moved on. Through the back window Shumann saw the reporter standing at the curb in the glare of the two unmistakable pariahgreen globes on either side of t
he entrance, still, gaunt, the garments which hung from the skeleton frame seeming to stir faintly and steadily even when and where there was no wind, as though having chosen that one spot out of the entire sprawled and myriad city he stood there without impatience or design: patron (even if no guardian) saint of all waifs, all the homeless the desperate and the starved. Now the cab turned its back on Grandlieu Street, though presently it turned parallel to it or to where it must be now, since now there was no rumor, no sound, save the lightglare on the sky which held to their right even after the cab turned and now ran toward where the street should be; Shumann did not know they had crossed it until they plunged suddenly into the region of narrow gashes between balconies, crossing intersections marked by the ghostly oneway arrows. “We must be almost there,” he said. “You want to stop and eat?”

  “All right,” Jiggs said.

  “Do you or dont you?”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Whatever you want me to do.” Then Shumann looked at him and saw him trying to hold the cigarette to his mouth with both hands, and that the cigarette was dead.

  “What do you want?” Shumann said.

  “I want a drink,” Jiggs said quietly.

  “Do you have to have one?”

  “I guess I dont if I cant get one.” Shumann watched him holding the dead cigarette to his mouth, drawing at it.

  “If I give you a drink, will you eat something?”

  “Yair. I’ll do anything.” Shumann leaned forward and tapped on the glass. The driver turned his head.

  “Where can I get something to eat?” Shumann said. “A bowl of soup?”

  “You’ll have to go back up toward Grandlieu for that.”

  “Aint there any place close around here?”

  “You can get a ham sandwich at these wop stores, if you can find one open.”

  “All right. Stop at the next one you see, will you?” It was not far; Shumann recognised the corner, though he asked to be sure as they got out. “Noy-dees Street aint far from here, is it?”

  “Noyades?” the driver said. “That’s it in the next block there. On the right.”

  “We’ll get out here then,” Shumann said. He drew out the crumpled money which the reporter had given him, glancing down at the plump neat figure five in the corner. “That makes eleven-seventy,” he thought, then he discovered a second bill crumpled into the first one; he passed it to the driver, still looking at the compact “5” on the one in his hand. “Damn,” he thought. “That’s seventeen dollars”, as the driver spoke to him:

  “It’s just two-fifteen. Aint you got anything smaller than this?”

  “Smaller?” Shumann said. He looked at the bill in the driver’s hand, held so that the light from the meter fell upon it. It was a ten. “No,” he thought; he didn’t even swear now. “It’s twenty-two dollars.” The store was a room the size shape and temperature of a bankvault. It was illuminated by one kerosene lamp which seemed to cast not light but shadows, out of whose brown Rembrandtgloom the hushed bellies of ranked cans gleamed behind a counter massed with an unbelievable quantity of indistinguishable objects which the proprietor must vend by feel alone to distinguish not only object from object but object from chiaroscuro. It smelled of cheese and garlic and of heated metal; sitting on either side of a small fiercelyburning kerosene heater a man and a woman, both wrapped in shawls and distinguishable by gender only because the man wore a cap and whom Shumann had not seen until now, looked up at him. The sandwich was the end of a hard French loaf, with ham and cheese. He gave it to Jiggs and followed him out, where Jiggs stopped again and stood looking at the object in his hand with a sort of ox-like despair.

  “Could I have the drink first?” he said.

  “You eat while we walk home,” Shumann said. “I’ll give you the drink later.”

  “It would be better if I had the drink first,” Jiggs said.

  “Yes,” Shumann said. “You thought that this morning too.”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “That’s right.” He became motionless again, looking at the sandwich.

  “Go on,” Shumann said. “Eat it.”

  “All right,” Jiggs said. He began to eat; Shumann watched him bring the sandwich to his mouth with both hands and turn his face sideways to bite into it; he could see Jiggs shaking and jerking all over now as he worried the bite off and began to chew; chewing, Jiggs looked full at Shumann, holding the bitten sandwich in both grimed hands before his breast as though it were a crucifix, chewing with his mouth open, looking full at Shumann until Shumann realised that Jiggs was not looking at him at all, that the one good eye was merely open and filled with a profound and hopeless abnegation as if the despair which both eyes should have divided between them had now to be concentrated and contained in one alone, and that Jiggs’ face was now slicked over with something which in the faint light resembled oil in the instant before Jiggs began to vomit. Shumann held him up, holding the sandwich clear with the other hand, while Jiggs’ stomach continued to go through the motions of refusal long after there was nothing left to abdicate.

  “Try to stop it now,” Shumann said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth.

  “Here,” Shumann said. He extended his handkerchief. Jiggs took it, but at once he reached his hand again, groping. “What?” Shumann said.

  “The sandwich.”

  “Could you hold it down if you had a drink?”

  “I could do anything if I had a drink,” Jiggs said.

  “Come on,” Shumann said. When they entered the alley they could see the outfall of light from the window beyond the balcony as Hagood had seen it last night, though there was now no armshadow, no voice. Shumann halted beneath the balcony. “Jack,” he said. “Laverne.” But still there was nothing to see: just the parachute jumper’s voice from beyond the window:

  “It’s off the latch. Lock it when you come in.” When they came up the stairs the jumper was sitting on the cot, in his underclothes, his clothing arranged neatly on a chair and his foot on the chair too while with a stained wad of cotton he swabbed liquid from a bottle into the long raw abrasion like a paintsmear from his ankle to his thigh. On the floor lay the bandage and tape which he had worn in from the airport. He had already arranged the cot for the night; the blanket was turned neatly back and the rug from the floor spread over the foot.

  “You better sleep in the bed tonight,” Shumann said. “That blanket will give that skinned place hell.” The jumper did not answer, bent over his leg, swabbing the medicine in with a sort of savage concentration. Shumann turned; he seemed to notice for the first time the sandwich in his hand and then to remember Jiggs who now stood quietly beside his canvas bag, watching Shumann quietly and patiently with the one eye, with that patient inarticulate quality of a dog. “Oh yes,” Shumann said, turning on toward the table. The jug still sat there, though the glasses and the dishpan were gone and the jug itself appeared to have been washed. “Get a glass and some water,” he said. When the curtain fell behind Jiggs Shumann laid the sandwich on the table and looked at the jumper again. After a moment the jumper looked up at him.

  “Well?” the jumper said. “What about it?”

  “I guess I can get it,” Shumann said.

  “You mean you didn’t see Ord?”

  “Yair. We found him.”

  “Suppose you do get it. How are you going to get it qualified in time to race tomorrow?”

  “I dont know,” Shumann said. He lit a cigarette. “He said he could get that fixed up. I dont know, myself.”

  “How? Does the race committee think he is Jesus too, the same as the rest of you do?”

  “I said I dont know,” Shumann said. “If we cant get it qualified, that’s all there is to it. But if we can.……” He smoked. The jumper swabbed carefully and viciously at his leg. “There’s two things I could do,” Shumann said. “It will qualify under five hundred and seventy-five cubic inches. I could enter it in that and loaf back on half throttle and tak
e third without having to make a vertical turn, and the purse tomorrow is eight-ninety. Or I could enter the other, the Trophy. It will be the only thing out there that will even stay in sight of Ord. And Ord is just in it so his home folks can see him fly; I dont believe he would beat that Ninety-Two to death just to win two thousand dollars. Not on a five mile course. Because it must be fast. We would be fixed then.”

  “Yes; fixed. She’d owe Ord about five thousand for the crate and the motor. What’s wrong with it?”

  “I dont know. I didn’t ask Ord. All I know is what Ord told him—” he made a brief indescribable motion with his head as though to indicate the room but which indicated the reporter as plainly as if Shumann had spoken his name—“he said the controls cross when it lands. Whether it’s slowing up or whether it’s the air off the ground. Because he said that Ord stalled it out when he.……Or maybe a different weight distribution, a couple of sandbags in the——”

  “Yair. Or maybe when he gets it qualified tomorrow he will have them move the pylons up to around four thousand feet and hold the race up there instead of at General Behindman’s country club.” He ceased and bent over his leg again, then Shumann also saw Jiggs. He had apparently been in the room for some time, standing beside the table with two of the jam glasses, one of them containing water, in his hands. Shumann went to the table and poured into the empty glass and looked at Jiggs who now mused upon the drink.

  “Aint that enough?” Shumann said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said, rousing; “yair.” When he poured water from the other glass into the drink the two rims clicked together with a faint chattering; Shumann watched him set the water glass down, where it chattered again on the table before he released it, and then with both hands attempt to raise the other one to his lips. As the glass approached Jiggs’ whole head began to jerk so that he could not make contact with his mouth, the rim of the glass clicking against his teeth while he tried to still it. “Jesus,” he said quietly, “Jesus. I tried for two hours to sit on the bed because when I would walk up and down the guy would come and holler at me through the bars.”