“I see,” the secretary said pleasantly. “I was waiting for you to bring that up. You seem to have forgotten that the note has a third signer.” Ord stared at him for a minute.
“But he aint good for it either,” he said.
“Possibly not, alone. But Mr Shumann tells us that his father is and that his father will honor this signature. So by your own token, the question seems to resolve to whether or not Mr Shumann did or did not sign his and his father’s name to the note. And we seem to have a witness to that. It is not exactly legal, I grant you. But this other signer is known to some of us here; you know him yourself, you tell us, to be a person of unassailable veracity. We will have him in.” Then it was that the amplifyers began to call the reporter’s name; he entered; he came forward while they watched him. The secretary extended the note toward him. (“Jesus,” the reporter thought, “they must have sent a ship over for Marchand.”)
“Will you examine this?” the secretary said.
“I know it,” the reporter said.
“Will you state whether or not you and Mr Shumann signed it in each other’s presence and in good faith?” The reporter looked about, at the faces behind the table, at Shumann sitting with his head bent a little and at Ord halfrisen, glaring at him. After a moment Shumann turned his head and looked quietly at him.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “We signed it.”
“There you are,” Feinman said. He rose. “That’s all. Shumann has possession; if Ord wants anymore to be stubborn about it we will just let him run to town and see if he can get back with a writ of replevin before time for the race.”
“But he cant enter it!” Ord said. “It aint qualified.” Feinman paused long enough to look at Ord for a second with impersonal inscrutability.
“Speaking for the citizens of Franciana who donated the ground and for the citizens of New Valois that built the airport the race is going to be run on, I will waive qualification.”
“You cant waive the A.A.A.,” Ord said. “You cant make it official if he wins the whole damn meet.”
“Then he will not need to rush back to town to pawn a silver cup,” Feinman said. He went out; the others rose from the table and followed. After a moment Ord turned quietly to Shumann.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better check her over.”
The reporter did not see them again. He followed them through the rotundra, through the amplifyer’s voice and through the throng at the gates, or so he thought because his policecard had passed him before he remembered that they would have had to go around to reach the apron. But he could see the aeroplane with a crowd standing around it, and then the woman had forgot too that Shumann and Ord would have to go around and through the hangar; she emerged again from the crowd beneath the bandstand. “So they did it,” she said. “They let him.”
“Yes. It was all right. Like I told you.”
“They did it,” she said, staring at him yet speaking as though in amazed soliloquy. “Yes. You fixed it.”
“Yes. I knew that’s all it would be. I wasn’t worried. And dont you——” But she was gone; she didn’t move for a moment; there was nothing of distraction especially; he just seemed to hang substanceless in the long peaceful backwash of waiting, saying quietly out of the dreamy smiling, “Yair. Ord talking about how he would be disqualified for the cup, the prize, like that would stop him, like that was what.…” not even aware that it was only the shell of her speaking quietly back to him, asking him if he would mind the boy.
“Since you seem to be caught up for the time.”
“Yair,” he said. “Of course.” Then she was gone, the white dress and the trenchcoat lost in the crowd—the ones with ribbon badges and the ones in dungarees—which streamed suddenly down the apron toward the darkhorse, the sensation. As he stood so, holding the little boy by one damp sticky hand, the Frenchman Despleins passed again down the runway which parallelled the stands, on one wheel; the reporter watched him takeoff and half roll, climbing upside down: now he heard the voice; he had not heard it since it called his own name despite the fact that it had never ceased, perhaps because of the fact:
“——oh oh oh mister, dont, dont! Oh, mister! Please get up high enough so your parachute can try to open! Now, now; now, now——Oh, Mac! Oh, Mr Sales! Make him stop!” The reporter looked down at the boy.
“I bet you a dime you haven’t spent that nickel,” he said.
“Naw,” the boy said. “I aint had a chance to. She wouldn’t let me.”
“Well, my goodness!” the reporter said. “I owe you twenty cents then, dont I? Come——” He paused, turning; it was the photographer, the man whom he had called Jug, laden again with the enigmatic and faintly macabre utensils of his calling so that he resembled vaguely a trained dog belonging to a country doctor.
“Where in hell you been?” the photographer said. “Hagood told me to find you at ten oclock.”
“Here I am,” the reporter said. “We’re just going inside to spend twenty cents. Want to come?” Now the Frenchman came up the runway about twenty feet high and on his back, his head and face beneath the cockpitrim motionless and alert like that of a roach or a rat immobile behind a crack in a wainscoat, his neat short beard unstirred by any wind as though cast in one piece of bronze.
“Yair,” the photographer said; perhaps it was the bilious aspect of an inverted world seen through a hooded lens or emerging in grimacing and attitudinal miniature from stinking trays in a celibate and stygian cell lighted by a red lamp: “and have that guy come down on his whiskers and me not here to get it?”
“All right,” the reporter said. “Stay and get it.” He turned to go on.
“Yair; but Hagood told me——” the photographer said. The reporter turned back.
“All right,” he said. “But hurry up.”
“Hurry up what?”
“Snap me. You can show it to Hagood when you go in.” He and the boy went on; he did not walk back into the voice, he had never walked out of it:
“——an in-ver-ted spin, folks; he’s going into it still upside down—oh oh oh oh——” The reporter stooped suddenly and lifted the boy to his shoulder.
“We can make better time,” he said. “We will want to get back in a few minutes.” They passed through the gate, among the gaped and upturned faces which choked the gangway. “That’s it,” he thought quietly, with that faint quiet grimace almost like smiling; “they aint human. It aint adultery; you cant anymore imagine two of them making love than you can two of them aeroplanes back in the corner of the hangar, coupled.” With one hand he supported the boy on his shoulder, feeling through the harsh khaki the young brief living flesh. “Yair; cut him and it’s cylinder oil; dissect him and it aint bones: it’s little rockerarms and connecting rods——” The restaurant was crowded; they did not wait to eat the icecream there on a plate; with one cone in his hand and one in the boy’s and the two chocolate bars in his pocket they were working back through the crowded gangway when the bomb went and then the voice:
“—fourth event: unlimited free-for-all, Vaughn Trophy race, prize two thousand dollars. You will not only have a chance to see Matt Ord in his famous Ninety-Two Ord-Atkinson Special in which he set a new land plane speed record, but as a surprise entry through the courtesy of the American Aeronautical Association and the Feinman Airport Commission, Roger Shumann who yesterday nosed over in a forced landing, in a special rebuilt job that Matt Ord rebuilt himself. Two horses from the same stable, folks, and two pilots both of whom are so good that it is a pleasure to give the citizens of New Valois and Franciana the chance to see them pitted against each other——” He and the boy watched the takeoff, then they went on; presently he found her—the brown hat and the coat—and he came up and stood a little behind her steadying the boy on his shoulder and carrying the second melting cone in his other hand as the four aeroplanes came in on the first lap—the red-and-white monoplane in front and two more side by side and some distance back, so that at first h
e did not even see Shumann. Then he saw him, higher than the others and well outside, though the voice now was not from the amplifyer but from a mechanic:
“Jesus, look at Shumann! It must be fast: he’s flying twice as far as the rest of them—or maybe Ord aint trying.……Why in hell dont he bring it on in?” Then the voice was drowned in the roar, the snarl, as the aeroplanes turned the field pylon and, followed by the turning heads along the apron as if the faces were geared to the sound, diminished singly out and over the lake again, Shumann still quite wide, making a turn that was almost a skid yet holding his position. They converged toward the second pylon, the lake one; in slightly irregular order and tiny now with distance and with Shumann still cautiously high and outside they wafted lightly upward and around the pylon. Now the reporter could hear the mechanic again: “He’s coming in now, watch him. Jesus, he’s second—he’s diving in—Jesus, he’s going to be right behind Ord on this pylon; maybe he was just feeling it out—” The noise was faint now and disseminated; the drowsy afternoon was domed with it and the four machines seemed to hover like dragonflies silently in vacuum, in various distancesoftened shades of pastel against the ineffable blue, with now a quality trivial, random, almost like notes of music—a harp, say—as the sun glinted and lost them. The reporter leaned down to the woman who was not yet aware of his presence, crying,
“Watch him! Oh, can he fly! Can he fly! And Ord aint going to beat the Ninety-Two to——Second money Thursday, and if Ord aint going to——Oh, watch him! Watch him!” She turned: the jaw, the pale eyes, the voice which he did not even listen to:
“Yes. The money will be fine.” Then he even stopped looking at her, staring down the runway as the four aeroplanes, now in two distinct pairs, came in toward the field, increasing fast. The mechanic was talking again:
“He’s in! Jesus, he’s going to try Ord here! And look at Ord giving him room——” The two in front began to bank at the same time, side by side, the droning roar drawing down and in as though sucked down out of the sky by them in place of being produced by them. The reporter’s mouth was still open; he knew that by the needling of nerves in his sore jaw; later he was to remember seeing the icecream cone crush in his fist and begin to ooze between his fingers as he let the little boy slide to the ground and took his hand, though not now; now the two aeroplanes, side by side and Shumann outside and now above, banked into the pylon as though bolted together, when the reporter suddenly saw something like a light scattering of burnt paper or feathers floating in the air above the pylontip. He was watching this, his mouth still open, when a voice somewhere said, “Ahhhhhhh!” and he saw Shumann now shooting almost straight upward and then a whole wastebasketful of the light trash blew out of the aeroplane; they said later about the apron that he used the last of his control before the fuselage broke to zoom out of the path of the two aeroplanes behind while he looked down at the closepeopled land and the empty lake, and made a choice before the tailgroup came completely free. But most of them were busy saying how his wife took it, how she did not scream nor faint (she was standing quite near the microphone, near enough for it to have caught the scream) but instead she just stood there and watched the fuselage break in two and said, “Oh damn you, Roger! Oh damn you! damn you!” and turned and snatched the little boy’s hand and ran toward the seawall, the little boy dangling vainly on his short legs between her and the reporter who, holding the little boy’s other hand, ran at his loose lightlyclattering gallop like a scarecrow in a gale, after the bright plain shape of love. Perhaps it was the added weight because she turned, still running, and gave him a single pale cold terrible look, crying,
“God damn you to hell! Get away from me!”
Lovesong of J. A. Prufrock
On the shell beach between the boulevard and the seaplane slip one of the electric company’s trucks stood while its crew set up a searchlight at the water’s edge. When the photographer called Jug saw the reporter he was standing beside the empty truck, in the backwash which it created between the faces beyond the policeline, and the men—police and newspapermen and airport officials and the others, the ones without authority or object who manage to pass policelines at all scenes of public violence—gathered along the beach. The photographer approached at a flagging trot, the camera banging against his flank. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I got that, all right. Only Jesus, I near vomited into the box while I was changing plates.” Beyond the crowd at the wateredge and just beyond the outer markers of the seaplane basin a police launch was scattering the fleet of small boats which, like most of the people on the beach itself, had appeared as though by magic from nowhere like crows, to make room for the dredgeboat to anchor over the spot where the aeroplane was supposed to have sunk. The seaplane slip, dredged out, was protected from the sluggish encroachment of the lake’s muddy bottom by a sunken mole composed of various refuse from the city itself—shards of condemned paving and masses of fallen walls and even discarded automobile bodies—any and all the refuse of man’s twentieth century clotting into communities large enough to pay a mayor’s salary—dumped into the lake. Either directly above or just outside of this mass the aeroplane was believed, from the accounts of three oystermen in a dory who were about two hundred yards away, to have struck the water. The three versions varied as to the exact spot, despite the fact that both wings had reappeared on the surface almost immediately and were towed ashore, but then one of the oystermen (from the field, the apron, Shumann could be seen struggling to open the cockpit hatch as though to jump, as though with the intention of trying to open his parachute despite his lack of height)—one of the oystermen claimed that the body had fallen free of the machine, having either extricated itself or been flung out. But the three agreed that the body and the machine were both either upon or beside the mole from whose vicinity the police launch was now harrying the small boats. It was after sunset. Upon the mirrorsmooth water even the little foul skiffs—the weathered and stinking dories and dinghys of oyster- and shrimpmen—had a depthless and fairy-light quality as they scattered like butterflies or moths before a mechanical reaper, just ahead of the trim low martial-colored police launch, onto which at the moment the photographer saw being transferred from one of the skiffs two people whom he recognised as being the dead pilot’s wife and child; among them the dredge looked like something antediluvian crawled for the first time into light, roused but not alarmed by the object or creature out of the world of light and air which had plunged without warning into the watery fastness where it had been asleep. “Jesus,” the photographer said. “Why wasn’t I standing right here: Hagood would have had to raise me then. Jesus God,” he said in a hoarse tone of hushed and unbelieving amazement, “how’s it now for being a poor bastard that never even learned to rollerskate?” The reporter looked at him, for the first time. The reporter’s face was perfectly calm; he looked down at the photographer, turning carefully as though he were made of glass and knew it, blinking a little, and spoke in a peaceful dreamy voice such as might be heard where a child is sick—not sick for a day or even two days, but for so long that even wasting anxiety has become mere surface habit:
“She told me to go away. I mean, to go clean away, like to another town.”
“She did?” the photographer said. “To what town?”
“You dont understand,” the reporter said, in that peaceful baffled voice. “Let me explain to you.”
“Yair; sure,” the photographer said. “I still feel like vomiting too. But I got to get on in with these plates. And I bet you aint even phoned in. Have you?”
“What?” the reporter said. “Yes. I phoned in. But listen. She didn’t understand. She told me——”
“Come on, now,” the other said. “You will have to call in with the buildup on it. Jesus, I tell you I feel bad too. Here, smoke a cigarette. Yair. I could vomit too. But what the hell? He aint our brother. Come on, now.” He took the cigarettes from the reporter’s coat and took two from the pack and struck a match. The reporter rou
sed somewhat; he took the burning match himself and held it to the two cigarettes. But then at once the photographer seemed to watch him sink back into that state of peaceful physical anesthesia as though the reporter actually were sinking slowly away from him into clear and limpid water out of which the calm, slightly distorted face looked and the eyes blinked at the photographer with that myopic earnestness while the voice repeated patiently,
“But you dont understand. Let me explain it to——”
“Yair; sure,” the other said. “You can explain it to Hagood while we are getting a drink.” The reporter moved obediently. But before they had gone very far the photographer realised that they had reassumed their customary mutual physical complementing when working together: the reporter striding on in front and the photographer trotting to keep up. “That’s the good thing about being him,” the photographer thought. “He dont have to move very far to go nuts in the first place and so he dont have so far to come back.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Let’s move. We got to eat, and the rest of them have got to read. And if they ever abolish fornication and blood, where in hell will we all be?—Yair. You get on in with what you got; if they get it up right away it will be too dark to get anything. I’ll stay out here and cover it. You can tell Hagood.”
“Yair; sure,” the photographer said, trotting, the camera bouncing against his flank. “We’ll have a shot and we’ll feel better. For Christ’s sake, we never made him go up in it.” Before they reached the rotundra the sunset had faded; even while they walked up the apron the boundary lights came on, and now the flat swordlike sweep of the beacon swung in across the lake and vanished for an instant in a long flick! as the turning eye faced them full, and then reappeared again as it swung now over the land to complete its arc. The field, the apron, was empty, but the rotundra was full of people and with a cavernous murmuring sound which seemed to linger not about the mouths which uttered it but to float somewhere about the high serene shadowy dome overhead; as they entered a newsboy screamed at them, flapping the paper, the headline: PILOT KILLED. SHUMANN CRASHES INTO LAKE. SECOND FATALITY OF AIRMEET. as it too flicked away. The bar was crowded too, warm with lights and with human bodies. The photographer led the way now, shouldering into the rail, making room for the reporter beside him. “Rye, huh?” he said, then to the bartender, loudly: “Two ryes.”