“While you are supposing,” the fourth said, “what do you suppose his wife was thinking about?”
“That’s easy,” the first said. “She was thinking, ‘Thank God I carry a spare’.” They did not laugh; the reporter heard no sound of laughter, sitting quiet and immobile on his beer-case while the cigarette smoke lifted in the unwinded stale air and broke about his face, streaming on, and the voices spoke back and forth with a sort of brisk dead slap-slap-slap like that of the cards.
“Do you suppose it’s a fact that they were both laying her?” the third said.
“That’s not news,” the first said. “But how about the fact that Shumann knew it too? Some of these mechanics that have known them for some time say they dont even know who the kid belongs to.”
“Maybe both,” the fourth said. “A dual personality: the flying Jekyll and Hyde brother, who flies the ship and makes the parachute jump all at once.”
“Unless he cant ever tell which one of him it is that’s getting the insertion into the ship,” the third said.
“Well, that will be all right too,” the first said. “Just so it’s one of them and actually inserted, the ship wont care which one it is.” The reporter did not move, only his hand, the arm bending at the elbow which rested upon his knee, rose with the cigarette to his mouth and became motionless again while he drew in the smoke with an outward aspect of intense bemused concentration, trembling quietly and steadily and apparently not only untroubled by it but not even aware of it, like a man who has had palsy for years and years; the voices might have indeed been the sound of the cards or perhaps leaves blowing past him.
“You bastards,” the second said. “You dirtymouthed bastards. Why dont you let the guy rest? Let them all rest. They were trying to do what they had to do, with what they had to do it with, the same as all of us only maybe a little better than us. At least without squealing and bellyaching.”
“Sure,” the first said. “You get the point exactly. What they could do, with what they had to do it with: that’s just what we were talking about when you called us dirtyminded bastards.”
“Yes,” the third said. “Grady’s right. Let him rest; that’s what she seems to have done herself. But what the hell: probably nowhere to send him, even if she had him out of there. So it would be the same whether she stayed any longer or not, besides the cost. Where do you suppose they are going?”
“Where do people like that go?” the second said. “Where do mules and vaudeville acts go? You see a wagon broken down in the ditch or you see one of those trick bicycles with one wheel and the seat fourteen feet from the earth in a pawnshop. But do you wonder whatever became of whatever it was that used to make them move?”
“Do you mean you think she cleared out just to keep from having to pay out some jack to bury him if they get him up?” the fourth said.
“Why not?” the second said. “People like that dont have money to spend on corpses because they dont use money. It dont take money especially to live; it’s only when you die that you or somebody has got to have something put away in the sock. A man can eat and sleep and keep the purity squad off of him for six months on what the undertaker will make you believe you cant possibly be planted for a cent less and preserve your selfrespect. So what would they have to bury him with even if they had him to bury?”
“You talk like he didn’t kill himself taking a chance to win two thousand dollars,” the third said.
“That’s correct. Oh, he would have taken the money, all right. But that wasn’t why he was flying that ship up there. He would have entered it if he hadn’t had anything but a bicycle, just so it would have got off the ground. But it aint for money. It’s because they have got to do it, like some women have got to be whores. They cant help themselves. Ord knew that the ship was dangerous, and Shumann must have known it as well as Ord did—dont you remember how for the first lap he stayed so far away he didn’t even look like he was in the same race, until he forgot and came in and tried to catch Ord? If it had just been the money, do you think he could have thought about money hard enough to have decided to risk his life to get it in a machine that he knew was unsafe, and then have forgot about the money for a whole lap of the race while he hung back there not half as close to the pylons as the judges were, just riding around? Dont kid yourself.”
“And dont kid yourself,” the first said. “It was the money. Those guys like money as well as you and me. What would he have done with it? Hell, what would any other three people do with two thousand bucks? She would have bought herself a batch of new clothes and they would have moved to the hotel from wherever it was they were staying, and they would have taken a couple of days and blowed it out good. That’s what they would have done. But they didn’t get it and so you are right, by God: what she did was the sensible thing: when a game blows up in your face you dont sit down on the pocketbook that used to make a bump on your ass and cry about it, you get out and hustle up another roll and go on and find another game that maybe you can beat. Yes. They want money, all right. But it aint to sweat just to have something in the sock when the snow flies, or to be buried with either. So I dont know anymore than you guys do but if somebody told me that Shumann had some folks somewhere and then they told me the name of the town she bought hers and the kid’s tickets to, I would tell you where Shumann used to live. And then I would bet a quarter maybe that the next time you see them, the kid wont be there. Because why? Because that’s what I would do if I were her. And so would you guys.”
“No,” the second said.
“You mean you wouldn’t or she wouldn’t?” the first said. The reporter sat motionless, the cigarette’s windless upstream breaking upon his face. “Yes,” the first said. “Before, they might not have known whose the kid was, but it was Shumann’s name he went under and so in comparison to the whole mess they must have lived in, who had actually fathered the kid didn’t matter. But now Shumann’s gone; you asked a while ago what she was thinking about while he was sitting up there waiting for that water to hit him. I’ll tell you what she and the other guy were both thinking about: that now that Shumann was gone, they would never get rid of him. Maybe they took it night about: I dont know. But now they couldn’t even get him out of the room; even turning off the light wont do any good, and all the time they would be awake and moving there he will be, watching them right out of the mixedup name, Jack Shumann, that the kid has. It used to be the guy had one competitor; now he will have to compete with every breath the kid draws and be cuckolded by every ghost that walks and refuses to give his name. So if you will tell me that Shumann has some folks in a certain town, I will tell you where she and the kid——” The reporter did not move. He sat quite still while the voice ceased on that note of abrupt transition, hearing out of the altered silence the voices talking at him and the eyes talking at him while he held himself rigid, watching the calculated hand flick the ash carefully from the cigarette. “You hung around them a lot,” the first said. “Did you ever hear any of them mention any kin that Shumann or she had?” The reporter did not move; he let the voice repeat the question; he even raised the cigarette again and flicked the ash off, or what would have been ash if he had not flicked it only a second ago. Then he started; he sat up, looking at them with an expression of startled interrogation.
“What?” he said. “What was that? I wasn’t listening.”
“Did you ever hear any mention of Shumann having any kinfolks, mother and father and such?” the first said. The reporter’s face did not alter.
“No,” he said. “I dont believe I did. I believe his mechanic told me that he was an orphan.”
It was two oclock then but the cab went fast, so it was just past two-thirty when the cab reached the Terrebonne and the reporter entered and leaned his gaunt desperate face across the desk while he spoke to the clerk. “Dont you call yourselves the headquarters of the American Aeronautical Association?” he said. “You mean you didn’t keep any registration of contestants and such? that
the committee just let them scatter to hell and gone over New Valois without——”
“Who is it you want to find?” the clerk said.
“Art Jackson. A stunt flyer.”
“I’ll see if there is any record. The meet was over yesterday.” The clerk left the window. The reporter leaned in it, not panting, just completely motionless until the clerk returned.
“There is an Arthur Jackson registered as staying at the Bienville Hotel yesterday. But whether or not he is——” But the reporter was gone, not running, but fast, back toward the entrance; a porter with a longhandled brush sweeping the floor jerked it back just before the reporter was about to walk through the brushhandle like it was a spiderweb. The taxi driver did not know exactly where the Bienville was, but at last they found it—a side street, a sign reading mostly Turkish Bath, then a narrow entrance, a corridor dimly lighted and containing a few chairs and a few palms and more spittoons than either and a desk beside which a negro in no uniform slept—a place ambiguous, redolent of hard Saturday nights, whose customers seldom had any baggage and beyond the turnings of whose dim and threadbare corridors there seemed to whisk forever bright tawdry kimonos in a kind of hopeful nostalgic convocation of all the bought female flesh which ever breathed and perished. The negro waked; there was no elevator; the reporter was directed to the room from his description of Jiggs and knocked beneath the ghost of two numbers attached to the door’s surface by the ghost of four tacks until the door opened and Jiggs blinked at him with the good eye and the injured one, wearing now only the shirt. The reporter held in his hand the slip of paper which had been clipped to the money the jumper gave him. He did not blink, himself: he just stared at Jiggs with that desperate urgency.
“The tickets,” he said. “Where——”
“Oh,” Jiggs said. “Myron, Ohio. Yair, that’s it on the paper. Roger’s old man. They’re going to leave the kid there. I thought you knew. You said you saw Jack at the——Here, doc! What is it?” He opened the door wider and put out his hand, but the reporter had already caught the doorjamb. “You come on in and set down a——”
“Myron, Ohio,” the reporter said. His face wore again that faint wrung quiet grimace as with the other hand he continued to try to put Jiggs’ hand aside even after Jiggs was no longer offering to touch him. He began to apologise to Jiggs for having disturbed him, talking through that thin wash over his wasted gaunt face which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“It’s all right, doc,” Jiggs said, watching him, blinking still with a sort of brutal concern. “Jesus, aint you been to bed yet? Here; you better come in here; me and Art can make room——”
“Yes, I’ll be getting on.” He pushed himself carefully back from the door as though he were balancing himself before turning the door loose, feeling Jiggs watching him. “I just happened to drop in. To say goodbye.” He looked at Jiggs with that thin fixed grimace while Jiggs blinked at him.
“Goodbye, doc. Only you better——”
“And good luck to you. Or do you say happy landings to a parachute jumper?”
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “I hope so.”
“Then happy landings too.”
“Yair. Thanks. The same to you, doc.” The reporter turned away. Jiggs watched him go down the corridor, walking with that curious light stiff care, and turn the corner and vanish. The light was even dimmer on the stairs than it had been in the corridor, though the brass strips which bound the rubber tread to each step glinted bright and still in the center where the heels had kept it polished. The negro was already asleep again in the chair beside the desk; he did not stir as the reporter passed him and went on and got into the cab, stumbling a little on the step.
“Back to the airport,” he said. “You needn’t hurry. We got until daylight.” He was back on the beach before daylight, though it was dawn before the other four saw him again, before they came out of the dark lunchstand and passed again through another barricade of parked cars though not so many this time since it was now Monday, and descended to the beach. They saw him then. The smooth water was a pale rose color from the waxing east, so that the reporter in silhouette against it resembled a tatting Christmas gift made by a little girl and supposed to represent a sleeping crane.
“Good Lord,” the third said. “You suppose he has been down here by himself all the time?” But they did not have much time to wonder about it; they were barely on time themselves; they heard the aeroplane taking off before they reached the beach and then they watched it circling; it came over into what they thought was position and the sound of the engine died for a time and then began again and the aeroplane went on, though nothing else happened. They saw nothing fall from it at all, they just saw three gulls converge suddenly from nowhere and begin to slant and tilt and scream above a spot on the water some distance away, making a sound like rusty shutters in a wind. “So that’s that,” the third said. “Let’s go to town.” Again the fourth one spoke the reporter’s name.
“Are we going to wait for him?” he said. They looked back, but the reporter was gone.
“He must have got a ride with somebody,” the third said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
When the reporter got out of the car at the Saint Jules Avenue corner the clock beyond the restaurant’s window said eight oclock. He did not look at the clock; he was looking at nothing for the time, shaking slowly and steadily. It was going to be another bright vivid day; the sunlight, the streets and walls themselves emanated that brisk up-and-doing sobriety of Monday morning. But he was not looking at that either; he was not looking at anything; when he began to see it was as if the letters were beginning to emerge from the back of his skull—the broad page under a rusting horseshoe, the quality of grateful astonishment which Monday headlines have like when you learn that the uncle whom you believed to have perished two years ago in a poorhouse fire died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona and left you five hundred dollars: AVIATOR’S BODY RESIGNED TO LAKE GRAVE. Then he quit seeing it. He had not moved; his pupils would still have repeated the page in inverted miniature, but he was not seeing it at all, shaking quietly and steadily in the bright warm sun until he turned and looked into the window with an expression of quiet and bemused despair—the notflies or were-flies, the two grapefruit halves, the printed names of food like the printed stations in a train schedule and set on an easel like a family portrait—and experienced that profound and unshakable not only reluctance but actual absolute refusal of his entire organism. “All right,” he said. “If I wont eat, then I am going to take a drink. If I wont go in here then I am going to Joe’s.” It was not far: just down an alley and through a barred door—one of the places where for fifteen years the United States had tried to keep them from selling whiskey and where for one year now it had been trying to make them sell it. The porter let him in and poured him a drink in the empty bar while starting the cork in the bottle itself. “Yair,” the reporter said. “I was on the wagon for an entire day. Would you believe that?”
“Not about you,” the porter said.
“Neither would I. It surprised me. It surprised the hell out of me until I found out it was two other guys. See?” He laughed too; it wasn’t loud; it still didn’t seem loud even after the porter was holding him up, calling him by name too, mister too, like Leonora, saying,
“Come on, now; try to quit now.”
“All right,” the reporter said. “I’ve quit now. If you ever saw any man quitter than me right now I will buy you an airplane.”
“O.K.,” the porter said. “Only make it a taxi cab and you go on home.”
“Home? I just come from home. I’m going to work now. I’m o.k. now. Give me another shot and just point me toward the door and I will be all right. All right, see? Then I learned by mistake that it was two other guys——” But he stopped himself, this time; he held himself fine while the porter poured the other drink and brought it to him; he had himself in hand fine now; he did not feel at all now: just the liquor flow
ing slow down him, fiery, dead, and cold; soon he would even quit shaking, soon he did quit; walking now with the bright unsoiled morning falling upon him he did not have anything to shake with. “So I feel better,” he said. Then he began to say it fast: “Oh God, I feel better! I feel better! I feel! I feel!” until he quit that too and said quietly, looking at the familiar wall, the familiar twin door through which he was about to pass, with tragic and passive clairvoyance: “Something is going to happen to me. I have got myself stretched out too far and too thin and something is going to bust.” He mounted the quiet stairs; in the empty corridor he drank from the bottle, though this time it was merely cold and felt like water. But when he entered the deserted city room he remembered that he could have drunk here just as well, and so he did. “I see so little of it,” he said. “I dont know the family’s habits yet.” But it was empty, or comparatively so, because he kept on making that vertical reverse without any rudder or flippers and looking down on the closepeopled land and the empty lake and deciding, and the dredgeboat hanging over him for twenty hours and then having to lie there too and look up at the wreath dissolving faintly rocking and stared at by gulls away, and trying to explain that he did not know. “I didn’t think that!” he cried. “I just thought they were all going. I dont know where, but I thought that all three of them, that maybe the hundred and seventy-five would be enough until Holmes could.……and that then he would be big enough and I would be there; I would maybe see her first and she would not look different even though he was out there around the pylon and so I wouldn’t be either even if it was forty-two instead of twenty-eight and he would come on in off the pylons and we would go up and she maybe holding my arm and him looking at us over the cockpit and she would say, ‘This is the one back in New Valois that time. That used to buy you the icecream’.” Then he had to hurry, saying, “Wait. Stop now. Stop” until he did stop, tall, humped a little, moving his mouth faintly as if he were tasting, blinking fast now and now stretching his eyelids to their full extent like a man trying to keep himself awake while driving a car; again it tasted, felt, like so much dead icy water, that cold and heavy and lifeless in his stomach; when he moved he could both hear and feel it sluggish and dead within him as he removed his coat and hung it on the chair-back and sat down and racked a sheet of yellow paper into the machine. He could not feel his fingers on the keys either: he just watched the letters materialise out of thin air, black sharp and fast, along the creeping yellow.