“Yair; rye,” the reporter said. Then he thought quietly, “I cant. I cannot.” He felt no revulsion from his insides; it was as though his throat and the organs of swallowing had experienced some irrevocable alteration of purpose from which he would suffer no inconvenience whatever but which would forever more mark the exchange of an old psychic as well as physical state for a new one, like the surrendering of a maidenhead. He felt profoundly and peacefully empty inside, as though he had vomited and very emptiness had supplied into his mouth or somewhere about his palate like a lubricant a faint thin taste of salt which was really pleasant: the taste not of despair but of Nothing. “I’ll go and call in now,” he said.
“Wait,” the photographer said. “Here comes your drink.”
“Hold it for me,” the reporter said. “It wont take but a minute.” There was a booth in the corner, the same from which he had called Hagood yesterday. As he dropped the coin in he closed the door behind him. The automatic dome light came on; he opened the door until the light went off again; he spoke not loud, his voice murmuring back from the close walls as he recapitulated at need with succinct and patient care as though reading into the telephone in a foreign tongue: “—yes, f-u-s-e-l-a-g-e. The body of the airplane, broke off at the tail.……No, he couldn’t have landed it. The pilots here said he used up what control he had left getting out of the way of the others and to head toward the lake instead of the grandst.……No, they say not. He wasn’t high enough for the chute to have opened even if he had got out of the ship.……yair, dredgeboat was just getting into position when I.……they say probably right against the mole; it may have struck the rocks and slid down.……Yair, if he should be close enough to all that muck the dredgeboat cant.……yair, probably a diver tomorrow, unless sometime during the night. And by that time the crabs and gars will have.……yair, I’ll stay out here and flash you at midnight.” When he came out of the booth, back into the light, he began to blink again like he might have a little sand in his eyes, trying to recall exactly what eyemoisture tasted like, wondering if perhaps the thin moist salt in his mouth might not somehow have got misplaced from where it belonged. The photographer still held his place at the bar and the drink was waiting, though this time he only looked down at the photographer, blinking, almost smiling. “You go on and drink it,” he said. “I forgot I went on the wagon yesterday.” When they went out to the cab, it was dark; the photographer, ducking, the camera jouncing on its strap, scuttled into the cab, turning a face likewise amazed and spent.
“It’s cold out here,” he said. “Jesus, I’m going to lock the damn door and turn on both them red lamps and fill me a good big tray to smell and I’m going to just sit there and get warm. I’ll tell Hagood you are on the job.” The face vanished, the cab went on, curbing away toward the boulevard where beyond and apparently just behind the ranked palms which lined it the glare of the city was visible even from here upon the overcast. People were still moiling back and forth across the plaza and in and out of the rotundra, and the nightly overcast had already moved in from the lake; against it the measured and regular swordsweep of the beacon was quite distinct, and there was some wind in it too; a long breath of it at the moment came down over the building and across the plaza and the palms along the boulevard began to clash and hiss with a dry wild sound. The reporter began to inhale the dark chill wind; it seemed to him that he could taste the lake, water, and he began to pant, drawing the air in by lungsfull and expelling it and snatching another lungfull of it as if he were locked inside a burning room and were hunting handfull by handfull through a mass of cotton batting for the doorkey, ducking his head and hurrying past the lighted entrance and the myriad eyes his face which for the time had frozen like a piece of unoiled machinery freezes, into a twisted grimace which filled his sore jaw with what felt like icy needles so that Ord had to call him twice before he turned and saw the other getting out of his roadster, still in the suede jacket and the hind-part-before cap in which he flew.
“I was looking for you,” Ord said, taking something from his pocket—the narrow strip of paper folded again as it had lain in the reporter’s fob pocket this morning before he gave it to Marchand. “Wait; dont tear it,” Ord said. “Hold it a minute.” The reporter held it while Ord struck the match. “Go on,” Ord said. “Look at it.” With his other hand he opened the note out, holding the match so that the reporter could see it, identify it, waiting while the reporter stood with the note in his hand long enough to have examined it anyway. “That’s it, aint it?” Ord said.
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“All right. Stick it to the match. I want you to do it yourself.……Damn it, drop it! Do you want to.……” As it floated down the flame seemed to turn back and upward, to climb up the falling scrap and on into space, vanishing; the charred carbon leaf drifted on without weight or sound and Ord ground his foot on it. “You bastard,” he said. “You bastard.”
“God, yes,” the reporter said, as quietly. “I’ll make out another one tomorrow. You will just have to take me alone——”
“Like hell. What are they going to do now?”
“I dont know,” the reporter said. Then at once he began to speak in that tone of peaceful and bemused incomprehensibility. “You see, she didn’t understand. She told me to go away. I mean, away. Let me ex—” But he stopped, thinking quietly, “Wait. I mustn’t start that. I might not be able to stop it next time.” He said: “They dont know yet, of course, until after the dredge.……I’ll be here. I’ll see to them.”
“Bring her on over home if you want to. But you better go yourself and take a couple of drinks. You dont look so good either.”
“Yair,” the reporter said. “Only I quit yesterday. I got mixed up and went on the wagon.”
“Yes?” Ord said. “Well, I’m going home. You better get in touch with her right away. Get her away from here. Just put her in a car and come on over home. If it’s where they say it is, it will take a diver to get him out.” He returned to the roadster; the reporter had already turned on too, back toward the entrance before he was aware of it, stopping again; he could not do it—the lights and the faces, not even for the warmth of lights and human suspirations, thinking, “Jesus, if I was to go in there I would drown.” He could go around the opposite hangar and reach the apron and be on his way back to the seaplane slip. But when he moved it was toward the first hangar, the one in which it seemed to him that he had spent enough of breathing’s incomprehensible and unpredictable frenzy and travail to have been born and raised there, walking away from the lights and sound and faces, walking in solitude where despair and regret could sweep down over the building and across the plaza and on into the harsh thin hissing of the palms and so at least he could breathe it, at least endure. It was as though some sixth sense, some economy out of profound inattention guided him, on through the blank door and the tool room and into the hangar itself where in the hard light of the overhead clusters the motionless aeroplanes squatted in fierce and depthless relief among one another’s monstrous shadows, and on to where Jiggs sat on the tongue of a dolly, the shined boots rigid and fiercely highlighted on his outthrust feet, gnawing painfully at a sandwich with one side of his face, his head turned parallel to the earth like a dog eats while the one good eye rolled, painful and bloodshot, up at the reporter.
“What is it you want me to do?” Jiggs said. The reporter blinked down at him with quiet and myopic intensity.
“You see, she didn’t understand,” he said. “She told me to go away. To let her alone. And so I cant——”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He drew the boots under him and prepared to get up, but he stopped and sat so for a moment, his head bent and the sandwich in one hand, looking at what the reporter did not know, because at once the single eye was looking at him again. “Will you look behind that junk over in the corner there and get my bag?” Jiggs said. The reporter found the canvas bag hidden carefully beneath a rubbish-heap of empty oil cans and boxes and such; w
hen he returned with it Jiggs was already holding one foot out. “Would you mind giving it a pull?” The reporter took hold of the boot. “Pull it easy.”
“Have they made your feet sore?” the reporter said.
“No. Pull it easy.” The boots came off easier than they did two nights ago; the reporter watched Jiggs take from the sack a shirt not soiled but filthy, and wipe the boots carefully, with an air thoughtful, intent, bemused, upper sole and all, and wrap them in the shirt and put them into the sack and, again in the tennis shoes and the makeshift leggings, hide the sack once more in the corner, the reporter following him to the corner and then back as if it were now the reporter who was the dog.
“You see,” he said (even as he spoke it seemed to him to be not himself speaking but something inside him which insisted on preempting his tongue)—“you see, I keep on trying to explain to somebody that she didn’t understand. Only she understands exactly, dont she? He’s out there in the lake and I cant think of anything plainer than that. Can you?” The main doors were locked now; they had to return through the tool room as the reporter had entered. As they emerged the beacon’s beam swept overhead again with its illusion of powerful and slow acceleration. “So they gave you all a bed this time,” he said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “The kid went to sleep on the police boat. Jack brought him in and they let them have a bed this time. She didn’t come in. She aint going to leave now, anyway. I’ll try if you want to, though.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “I guess you are right. I didn’t mean to try to make——I just wanted to.……” He began to think now. now. NOW. and it came: the long nebulous swordstroke sweeping steadily up from beyond the other hangar until almost overhead and then accelerating with that illusion of terrific strength and speed which should have left a sound, a swish, behind it but did not. “You see, I dont know about these things. I keep on thinking about fixing it up so that a woman, another woman——”
“All right,” Jiggs said. “I’ll try.”
“Just so she can see you and call you if she needs—wants.……if.……She wont even need to know I am——but if she should.……”
“Yair. I’ll fix it if I can.” They went on around the other hangar. Now they could see half of the beacon’s entire arc; the reporter could watch it now as it swung across the lake, watching the skeletonlattice of the empty bleachers come into relief against it, and the parapet of staffs from which the purple-and-gold pennons, black now, streamed rigid in the rising wind from the lake as the beam picked them up one by one and discarded them in swift and accelerating succession as it swept in and overhead and on, and they could see the looped bunting too tossing and laboring and even here and there blown out of the careful loops of three days ago and whipping in forlorn and ceaseless shreds as though, sentient itself, it had anticipated the midnight bells from town which would signal the beginning of Lent. And now, beyond the black rampart of the seawall the searchlight beside whose truck the photographer had found the reporter was burning—a fierce white downwardglaring beam brighter though smaller than the beacon—and they saw presently another one on the tower of the dredgeboat itself. In fact it was as though when they reached the seawall they would look down into a pit filled not by one steady source of light but by a luminous diffusion as though from the airparticles, beyond which the shoreline curved twinkling faintly away into darkness. But it was not until they reached the wall that they saw that the light came not from the searchlight on the shore nor the one on the dredgeboat nor the one on the slowly cruising police launch engaged still in harrying away the little skiffs from some of which puny flashlights winked but in most of which burned the weak turgid flame of kerosene, but from a line of automobiles drawn up along the boulevard. Extending for almost a mile along the shore and facing the water, their concerted refulgence, broken at short intervals by the buttons and shields of policemen and now by the sidearms and putties of a national guard company, glared down upon the disturbed and ceaseless dark water which seemed to surge and fall and surge and fall as though in travail of amazement and outrage. There was a skiff just landing from the dredgeboat; while the reporter waited for Jiggs to return the dark steady chill wind pushed hard against him, through his thin clothes; it seemed to have passed through the lights, the faint human sounds and movement, without gaining anything of warmth or light; after a while he believed that he could discern the faint hissing plaint of the ground and powdered oystershells on which he stood even above the deep steady humming of the searchlight not far away. The men from the skiff came up and passed him, Jiggs following. “It’s like they said,” Jiggs said. “It’s right up against the rocks. I asked the guy if they had hooked anything yet and he said hooked, hell; they had hooked something the first throw with one hook and aint even got the hook loose yet. But the other hook came up with a piece of that damn monococque plywood, and he said there was oil on it.” He looked at the reporter. “So that will be from the belly.”
“Yes,” the reporter said.
“So it’s bottomupwards. The guy says they think out there that it is fouled on some of them old automobiles and junk they throwed in to build it with.—Yair,” he said, though the reporter had not spoken, but had only looked at him: “I asked that too. She’s up yonder at that lunchwagon getting——” The reporter turned; like the photographer Jiggs now had to trot to keep up, scrabbling up the shelving beach toward the ranked automobiles until he bumped into the reporter who had paused in the headlights’ glare with his head lowered and one arm raised before his face. “Over this way,” Jiggs said, “I can see.” He took the reporter’s arm and guided him on to the gap in the cars where the steps led up from the beach and through the gap to where, across the boulevard, they could see the heads and shoulders against the broad low dingy window. Jiggs could hear the reporter breathing, panting, though the climb up from the beach had not been that hard. When the reporter’s fumbling hand touched his own it felt like ice.
“She hasn’t got any money,” the reporter said. “Hurry. Hurry.” Jiggs went on. Then the reporter could still see them (for the instant he made one as he pushed through them and went around the end of the lunchwagon to the smaller window)—the faces pressed to the glass and looking in at her where she sat on one of the backless stools at the counter between a policeman and one of the mechanics whom the reporter had seen about the hangar. The trenchcoat was open and there was a long smear either of oil or mud across the upper part of her white dress and she was eating, a sandwich, wolfing it and talking to the two men; he watched her drop the fragments back into the plate and wipe her hand across her mouth and lift the thick mug of coffee and drink, wolfing the coffee too, the coffee running down her chin from the toofast swallowing like the food had done. At last Jiggs finally found him, still standing there though now the counter was vacant and the faces had gone away too, followed back to the beach.
“Even the proprietor wanted to washout the check, but I got there in time,” Jiggs said. “She was glad to get it, too; you were right, she never had any money with her. Yair. She’s like a man about not bumming from just any guy. Always was. So it’s o.k.” But he was still looking at the reporter with an expression which a more observing person than the reporter could not have read now in the tough face to which the blue and swollen eye and lip lent no quality evoking compassion or warmth but on the contrary merely increased a little the face’s brutality. When he spoke again it was not in a rambling way exactly but with a certain curious alertness as of imminent and irrevocable dispersion; the reporter thought of a man trying to herd a half dozen blind sheep through a passage a little wider than he could span with his extended arms. Jiggs now had one hand in his pocket but the reporter did not notice it. “So she’s going to have to be out here all night, in case they begin to—And the kid’s already asleep; yair, no need to wake him up, and maybe tomorrow we will all know better where we—Yair, a night or two to sleep on it makes a lot of difference about anything, no matter how bad you think
you h—I mean.……” He stopped. (“He aint only not held the sheep, he aint even holding out his arms anymore,” the reporter thought) The hand came out of his pocket, opening; the doorkey glinted faintly on the grained palm. “She told me to give it back to you when I saw you,” Jiggs said. “You come on and eat something yourself, now.”
“Yes,” the reporter said. “It will be a good chance to, wont it. Besides, we will be in out of the cold for a little while.”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “Come on.” It was warm inside the lunchwagon; the reporter stopped shaking even before the food came. He ate a good deal of it, then he realised that he was going to eat all of it, without taste or enjoyment especially but with a growing conviction of imminent satisfaction like when a tooth cavity that has not been either pleasant or unpleasant is about to be filled without pain. The faces were gone from the window now, following her doubtless back to the beach, or as near to it as the police and soldiers would let them, where they now gazed no doubt at the police boat or whatever other boat she had reembarked in; nevertheless he and Jiggs still sat in it, breathed and chewed it along with the stale hot air and the hot rancid food—the breathing, the exhalation, the variations of the remark which the photographer had made; the ten thousand different smug and gratulant behind sighted forms of I might be a bum and a bastard but I am not out there in that lake. But he did not see her again. During the next three hours until midnight he did not leave the beach, while the ranked cars glared steadily downward and the searchlights hummed and the police launch cruised in slow circles while the little boats moved outward before its bows and inward again behind its stern like so many minnows in the presence of a kind of harmless and vegetarian whale, and steadily, with clocklike and deliberate precision, the long sicklebar of the beacon swept inward from the lake, to vanish at the instant when the yellow eye came broadside on and apparently halting there with only a slow and terrific centrifugal movement within the eye itself until with that gigantic and soundless flick! the beam shot incredibly outward across the dark sky. But he did not see her, though presently one of the little skiffs came in and beached to take on another bootleg cargo of twenty-five-cent passengers and Jiggs got out. “They are still fast to it,” he said. “They thought they had it started once but something happened down there and when they hauled up all they had was the cable; they were even short the hook. They say now it must have hit on one of those big blocks of concrete and broke it loose and they both went down together only the ship got there first. They’re going to send the diver down at daylight to see what to do. Only they dont want to use dynamite because even if it starts him back up it will bust the mole all to pieces. But they’ll know tomorrow.—Didn’t you want to call the paper at midnight or something?” There was a paystation in the lunchwagon, on the wall. Since there was no booth he had to talk into the telephone with his other ear plugged with his hand against the noise and again spending most of the time answering questions; when he turned away he saw that Jiggs was asleep on the backless stool, his arms folded on the counter and his forehead resting on them. It was quite warm inside, what with the constant frying of meat and with the human bodies with which the room was filled now long after its usual closing hour; the window facing the lake was fogged over so that the lighted scene beyond was one diffused glow such as might be shining behind falling snow; looking at it the reporter began to shake again, slowly and steadily inside the suit to which there was apparently no waistcoat, while there grew within him the first active sensation or impulse which he could remember since he watched Shumann begin to bank into the field pylon for the last time—a profound reluctance to go out which acted not on his will but on his very muscles. He went to the counter; presently the proprietor saw him and took up one of the thick cups.