Pylon

  “Coffee?”

  “No,” the reporter said. “I want a coat. Overcoat. Have you got one you could lend me or rent me? I’m a reporter,” he added. “I got to stick around down there at the beach until they get through.”

  “I aint got a coat,” the proprietor said. “But I got a piece of tarpaulin I keep my car under. You can use that if you will bring it back.”

  “All right,” the reporter said. He did not disturb Jiggs; when he emerged into the cold and the dark this time he resembled a soiled and carelessly setup tent. The tarpaulin was stiff and heavy to hold and presently heavy to carry too, but inside it he ceased to shake. It was well after midnight now and he had expected to find that the cars drawn up along the boulevard to face the lake would have thinned somewhat, but they had not. Individually they might have changed, but the ranked line was still intact—a silhouetted row of oval rearwindows framing the motionless heads whose eyes, along with the headlights, stared with immobile and unmurmuring patience down upon the scene in which they were not even aware that nothing was happening—that the dredge squatted inactive now, attached as though by one steel umbilical cord not to one disaster but to the prime oblivious mother of all living and derelict too. Steady and unflagging the long single spoke of the beacon swept its arc across the lake and vanished into the full broadside of the yellow eye and, already outshooting, swept on again, leaving that slow terrific vacuum in mind or sense which should have been filled with the flick and the swish which never came. The sightseeing skiff had ceased to ply, perhaps having milked the business or perhaps having been stopped by authority; the next boat to land came direct from the dredge, one of the passengers the mechanic who had sat beside the woman in the lunchwagon. This time the reporter did his own asking.

  “No,” the other said. “She went back to the field about an hour ago, when they found out they would have to wait for the diver. I’m going to turn in, myself. I guess you can knock off now yourself, cant you?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I can knock off now too.” At first he thought that perhaps he was going in, walking in the dry light treacherous shellpowder, holding the harsh stiff tarpaulin with both hands to ease the dead weight of it on his neck and shoulders; it was the weight, the cold rasp of it on his fingers and palms. “I’ll have to take it back first, like I promised,” he thought. “If I dont now, I wont do it at all.” The ramp of the boulevard rose here, so that the carlights passed over his head and he walked now in comparative darkness to where the seawall made its right angle with the boulevard. The wind did not reach here and since he could sit on the edge of the tarpaulin and fold it about him knees and all and so soon his body heated it inside like a tent. Now he did not have to watch the beacon sweep in from across the lake in its full arc but only when the beam materialised slicing across the pieshaped quarter of sky framed by the right angle of wall and ramp. It was the warmth; all of a sudden he had been telling Shumann for some time that she did not understand. And he knew that that was not right; all the while that he was telling Shumann he was also telling himself that that was not right; his cramped chin came up from the bony peaks of his knees; his feet were cold too or were probably cold because at first he did not feel them at all until they filled suddenly with the cold needles; now (the searchlight on the shore was black and only the one on the dredge stared as before downward into the water) the police boat layto and there was not one of the small boats in sight at all and he saw that most of the cars were gone too from the ramp overhead even while he was thinking that it could not possibly have been that long. But it had; the steady clocklike sweep flick! sweep. sweep flick! sweep of the beacon had accomplished something apparently, it had checked something off; as he looked upward the dark seawall overhead came into abrupt sharp relief and then simultaneous with the recognition of the glow as floodlights he heard the displacing of air and then saw the navigation lights of the transport as it slid, quite low, across the black angle and onto the field. “That means it’s after four oclock,” he thought. “That means it’s tomorrow.” It was not dawn yet though; before that he was trying to draw himself back as though by the arm while he was saying again to Shumann, “You see, it looks like I have just got to try to explain to somebody that she——” and jerked himself upward (he had not even leaned his head down to his knees this time and so had nowhere to jerk back to), the needles not needles now but actual ice and his mouth open as though it were not large enough to accommodate the air which his lungs required or the lungs not large enough to accommodate the air which his body had to have, and the long arm of the beacon sweeping athwart his gaze with a motion peremptory ruthless and unhurried and already fading and it some time even yet before he realised that it was not the beacon fading but the brightening sky. The sun had risen before the diver went down and came up, and most of the cars were back by then too, ranked into the ubiquitous blue-and-drab rampart. The reporter had returned the tarpaulin; relieved of its stiff and chafing weight he now shook steadily in the pink chill of the first morning of the entire four days to be ushered in by no overcast. But he did not see her again at all. There was a somewhat larger crowd than there had been the evening before (It was Sunday, and there were now two police launches and the number of skiffs and dories had trebled as though the first lot had spawned somewhere during the night) yet he had daylight to assist him now. But he did not see her. He saw Jiggs from a distance several times, but he did not see her; he did not even know that she had been to the beach again until after the diver came up and reported and he (the reporter) was climbing back toward the boulevard and the telephone and the parachute jumper called to him. The jumper came down the beach, not from the water but from the direction of the field, jerking the injured leg from which he had burst the dressing and the fresh scab in making his jump yesterday savagely after him, as though in raging contempt of the leg itself.

  “I was looking for you,” he said. From his pocket he took a neatlyfolded sheaf of bills. “Roger said he owed you twenty-two dollars. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. The jumper held the money clipped between two fingers and folded over under his thumb.

  “You got time to attend to some business for us or are you going to be busy?” he said.

  “Busy?” the reporter said.

  “Yes. Busy. If you are, say so so I can find somebody else to do it.”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”

  “You sure? If not, say so. It wont be much trouble; anybody can do it. I just thought of you because you seem to have already got yourself pretty well mixed up with us, and you will be here.”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I’ll do it.”

  “All right, then. We’re going to get away today. No use hanging around here. Those bastards out there—” he jerked his head toward the lake, the clump of boats on the rosy water “—aint going to get him out from under all that muck with just a handfull of ropes. So we’re going. What I want to do is leave some money with you in case they do fuck around out there and finally get him up.”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I see.” The jumper stared at him with that bleak tense quiet.

  “Dont think I like to ask this anymore than you like to hear it. But maybe you never sent for us to come here, and maybe we never asked you to move in on us; you’ll have to admit that. Anyway, it’s all done now; I cant help it anymore than you can.” The jumper’s other hand came to the money; the reporter saw how the bills had already been separated carefully into two parts and that the part which the jumper extended toward him was clipped neatly with two paper clips beneath a strip of paper bearing a neatly printed address, a name which the reporter read at a glance because he had seen it before when he watched Shumann write it on the note. “Here’s seventy-five bucks, and that’s the address. I dont know what it will cost to ship him. But if it is enough to ship him and still pay you your twenty-two bucks, do it. And if it aint enough to pay you your twenty-two and still ship him, ship
him and write me and I will send you the difference.” This time the slip of paper came, folded, from his pocket. “This is mine. I kept them separate so you wouldn’t get them mixed. Do you understand? Send him to the first address, the one with the money. And if there aint enough left to pay you your twenty-two, write to me at the second one and I will send it to you. It may take some time for the letter to catch up with me, but I will get it sooner or later and I will send you the money. Understand?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said.

  “All right. I asked you if you would attend to it and you said you would. But I didn’t say anything about promise. Did I?”

  “I promise,” the reporter said.

  “I dont want you to promise that. What I want you to promise is another thing. Something else. Dont think I want to ask it; I told you that; I dont want to ask it anymore than you want to hear it. What I want you to promise is, dont send him collect.”

  “I promise,” the reporter said.

  “All right. Call it a gamble on your twenty-two dollars, if you want to. But not collect. The seventy-five may not be enough. But all we got now is my nineteen-fifty from yesterday and the prize money from Thursday. That was a hundred and four. So I cant spare more than seventy-five. You’ll have to chance it. If the seventy-five wont ship him ho—to that address I gave you, you can do either of two things. You can pay the difference yourself and write me and I will send you the difference and your twenty-two. Or if you dont want to take a chance on me, use the seventy-five to bury him here; there must be some way you can do it so they can find him later if they want to. But dont send him collect. I am not asking you to promise to put out any money of your own to send him back; I am just asking you to promise not to leave it so they will have to pay him out of the freight or the express office. Will you?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “I promise.”

  “All right,” the jumper said. He put the money into the reporter’s hand. “Thanks. I guess we will leave today. So I guess I will tell you goodbye.” He looked at the reporter, bleak, his face spent with sleeplessness too, standing with the injured leg propped stiffly in the shelldust. “She took a couple of big drinks and she is asleep now.” He looked at the reporter with that bleak speculation which seemed to be almost clairvoyant. “Dont take it too hard. You never made him try to fly that crate anymore than you could have kept him from it. No man will hold that against you, and what she might hold against you wont hurt you because you wont ever see her again, see?”

  “Yes,” the reporter said. “That’s true.”

  “Yair. So sometime when she is feeling better about it I will tell her how you attended to this and she will be obliged to you, and for the rest of it too. Only take a tip from me and stick to the kind of people you are used to after this.”

  “Yes,” the reporter said.

  “Yair.” The jumper moved, shifting stiffly the injured leg to turn, then he paused again, looking back. “You got my address; it may take some time for the letter to catch up with me. But you will get your money. Well——” He extended his hand; it was hard, not clammy, just absolutely without warmth. “Thanks for attending to this and for trying to help us out. Be good to yourself.” Then he was gone, limping savagely away. The reporter did not watch him; after a while it was one of the soldiers who called him and showed him the gap.

  “Better put that stuff into your pocket, doc,” the soldier said. “Some of these guys will be cutting your wrist off.” The cab, the taxi, ran with the sun, yet a ray of it fell through the back window and glinted on a chromium fitting on the collapsible seat and though after a while the reporter gave up trying to move the seat and finally thought of laying his hat over the lightpoint, he still continued to try to blink away that sensation of light fine sand inside his lids. It didn’t matter whether he watched the backwardstreaming wall of moss and liveoaks above the dark waterglints or whether he tried to keep vision, sight, inside the cab. As soon as he closed them he would find himself, out of some attenuation of weariness, sleeplessness, confusing both the living and the dead without concern now, with profound conviction of the complete unimportance of either or of the confusion itself, trying with that mindless and unflagging optimism to explain to someone that she did not understand and now without bothering to decide or care whether or not and why or not he was asleep. The cab did not have to go as far up as Grandlieu Street and so he did not see a clock, though by the position of the balcony’s shadow across the door beneath it he guessed it to be about nine. In the corridor he quit blinking, and on the stairs too; but no sooner had he entered the room with the sun coming into the windows and falling across the bright savage bars of the blanket on the cot (even the other blankets on the walls, which the sun did not reach, seemed to have confiscated light into their harsh red-white-and-black lightnings and which they released slowly into the room as other blankets might have soaked up and then emitted the smell of horses) he began to blink again, with that intent myopic bemusement. He seemed to await the office of something outside himself before he moved and closed the jalousies before the windows. It was better then because for a while he could not see at all; he just stood there in some ultimate distillation of the savage bright neartropical day, not knowing now whether he was still blinking or not, in an implacable infiltration which not even walls could stop, from the circumambient breathing of fish and coffee and sugar and fruit and hemp and swampland dyked away from the stream because of which they came to exist, so that the very commercebearing units of their breath and life came and went not beside or among them but above them like straying skyscrapers putting in from and out to the sea. There was even less light beyond the curtain, though it was not completely dark. “How could it be,” he thought, standing quietly with his coat in one hand and the other already slipping the knot of his tie, thinking how no place where a man has lived for almost two years or even two weeks or even two days is completely dark to him without he has got so fat in the senses that he is already dead walking and breathing and all places are dark to him even in sunlight; not completely dark but just enough so that now the room’s last long instant of illimitable unforgetting seemed to draw in quietly in a long immobility of fleeing, with a quality poised and imminent but which could not be called waiting and which contained nothing in particular of farewell, but just paused inbreathing and without impatience and incurious, for him to make the move. His hand was already on the light, the switch.

  He had just finished shaving when Jiggs began to call his name from the alley. He took from the bed in passing the fresh shirt which he had laid out, and went to the window and opened the jalousie. “It’s on the latch,” he said. “Come on in.” He was buttoning the shirt when Jiggs mounted the stairs, carrying the canvas sack, wearing the tennis shoes and the bootlegs.

  “Well, I guess you have heard the news,” Jiggs said.

  “Yes. I saw Holmes before I came to town. So I guess you’ll all be moving now.”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “I’m going with Art Jackson. He’s been after me a good while. He’s got the chutes, see, and I have done some exhibition jumping and so it wont take me long to pick up free jumping, delayed.……Then we can split the whole twenty-five bucks between ourselves. But Jesus, it wont be like racing. Maybe I’ll go back to racing after a while, after I have.……” He stood motionless in the center of the room, holding the dragging canvas bag, the battered brutal face lowered and sober and painfully bemused. Then the reporter discovered what he was looking at. “Jesus,” Jiggs said, “I tried again to put them on this morning and I couldn’t even seem to open the bag and take them out.” That was about ten oclock because almost immediately the negress Leonora came in, in the coat and hat and carrying the neat basket beneath its neat cloth so fresh that the ironed creases were still visible. But the reporter only allowed her to put the basket down.