“I got one here,” the reporter said. He produced it, along with a mass of blank yellow copy and a folded newspaper of the morning, from the same pocket of his disreputable coat—a pamphlet already opened and creased back upon the faint mimeographed letters of the first page:
Thursday (Dedication Day)
2:30 P.M. Spot Parachute Jump. Purse $25.00
3:00 P.M. 200 cu. in. Dash. Qualifying Speed 100 mph. Purse $150.00 (1) 45%. (2) 30%. (3) 15% (4) 10%
3:30 P.M. Aerial Acrobatics. Jules Despleins, France. Lieut. Frank Burnham, United States
4:30 P.M. Scull Dash. 375 cu. in. Qualifying Speed 160 m.p.h. (1, 2, 3, 4)
5:00 P.M. Delayed Parachute Drop
8:00 P.M. Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane. Lieut. Frank Burnham
“Keep it,” the reporter said. “I dont need it.”
“Thanks,” the woman said. “I know the setup.” She looked at the boy. “Hurry and finish it,” she said. “You have already eaten more than you can hold.” The reporter looked at the boy too, with that expression leashed, eager, cadaverous; sitting forward on the flimsy chair in that attitude at once inert yet precarious and lightpoised as though for violent and complete departure like a scarecrow in a winter field. “All I can do for him is buy him something to eat,” he said. “To take him to see an air race would be like taking a colt out to Washington Park for the day. You are from Iowa and Shumann was born in Ohio and he was born in California and he has been across the United States four times, let alone Canada and Mexico. Jesus. He could take me and show me, couldn’t he?” But the woman was looking at the boy; she did not seem to have heard at all.
“Go on,” she said. “Finish it or leave it.”
“And then we’ll eat some candy,” the reporter said. “Hey, Dempsey?”
“No,” the woman said. “He’s had enough.”
“But maybe for later?” the reporter said. She looked at him now: the pale stare without curiosity, perfectly grave, perfectly blank, as he rose, moved, dry loose weightless and sudden and longer than a lath, the disreputable suit ballooning even in this windless conditioned air as he went toward the candy counter. Above the shuffle and murmur of feet in the lobby and above the clash and clatter of crockery in the restaurant the amplified voice still spoke, profound and effortless, as though it were the voice of the steel-and-chromium mausoleum itself talking of creatures imbued with motion though not with life and incomprehensible to the puny crawling painwebbed globe, incapable of suffering, wombed and born complete and instantaneous, cunning intricate and deadly, from out some blind iron batcave of the earth’s prime foundation:
“——dedication meet, Feinman million dollar airport, New Valois, Franciana, held under the official auspices of the American Aeronautical Association. And here is the official clocking of the winners of the two hundred cubic inch race which you just witnessed——” Now they had to breast the slow current; the gatemen (these wore tunics of purple-and-gold as well as caps) would not let them pass because the woman and the child had no tickets. So they had to go back and out and around through the hangar to reach the apron. And here the voice met them again—or rather it had never ceased; they had merely walked in it without hearing or feeling it like in the sunshine; the voice too almost as sourceless as light. Now, on the apron, the third bomb went and looking up the apron from where he stood among the other mechanics about the aeroplanes waiting for the next race, Jiggs saw the three of them—the woman in an attitude of inattentive hearing without listening, the scarecrow man who even from here Jiggs could discern to be talking steadily and even now and then gesticulating, the small khaki spot of the little boy’s dungarees riding high on his shoulder and the small hand holding a scarcetasted chocolate bar in a kind of static surfeit. They went on, though Jiggs saw them twice more, the second time the shadow of the man’s and the little boy’s heads falling for an incredible distance eastward along the apron. Then the taller man began to beckon him and already the five aeroplanes entered for the race were moving, the tails high on the shoulders of their crews, out toward the starting line.
When he and the taller man returned to the apron the band was still playing. Faced by the bright stands with their whipping skyline of purple-and-gold pennons the amplifyers at regular intervals along the apronedge erupted snatched blares of ghostlike and ubiquitous sound which, as Jiggs and the other passed them, died each into the next without loss of beat or particular gain in sense or tune. Beyond the amplifyers and the apron lay the flat triangle of reclaimed and tortured earth dragged with slow mechanical violence into air and alterations of light—the oyster-and-shrimpfossil bed notched into the ceaseless surface of the outraged lake and upon which the immaculate concrete runways lay in the attitude of two stiffly embracing capital Fs, on one of which the six aeroplanes rested like six motionless wasps, the slanting sun glinting on their soft bright paint and on the faint propellerblurs. Now the band ceased; the bomb bloomed again on the pale sky and had already begun to fade even before the jarring thud, the thin vicious crack of reverberation; and now the voice again, amplified and ubiquitous, louder even than the spatter and snarl of the engines as the six aeroplanes rose raggedly and dissolved, converging, coveying, toward the scattering pylon out in the lake: “—fourth event, Scull Speed Dash, three hundred and seventy-five cubic inch, twenty-five miles, five times around, purse three hundred and twenty-five dollars. I’ll give you the names of the contestants as the boys, the other pilots on the apron here, figure they will come in. First and second will be Al Myers and Bob Bullitt, in number thirty-two and number five. You can take your choice, your guess is as good as ours; they are both good pilots—Bullitt won the Graves Trophy against a hot field in Miami in December—and they are both flying Chance Specials. It will be the pilot, and I’m not going to make anybody mad by making a guess——Vas you dere, Sharlie? I mean Mrs Bullitt. The other boys are good too, but Myers and Bullitt have the ships. So I’ll say third will be Jimmy Ott, and Roger Shumann and Joe Grant last, because as I said, the other boys have the ships——There they are, coming in from the scattering pylon, and it’s——Yes, it’s Myers or Bullitt out front and Ott close behind, and Shumann and Grant pretty well back. And here they are coming in for the first pylon.” The voice was firm, pleasant, assured; it had an American reputation for announcing air meets as other voices had for football or music or prizefights. A pilot himself, the announcer stood hiphigh among the caps and horns of the bandstand below the reserved seats, bareheaded, in a tweed jacket even a little oversmart, reminiscent a trifle more of Hollywood Avenue than of Madison, with the modest winged badge of a good solid pilots’ fraternity in the lapel and turned a little to face the box seats while he spoke into the microphone as the aeroplanes roared up and banked around the field pylon and faded again in irregular order.
“There’s Feinman,” Jiggs said. “In the yellow-and-blue pulpit. The one in the gray suit and the flower. The one with the women. Yair; he’d make lard, now.”
“Yes,” the taller man said. “Look yonder. Roger is going to take that guy on this next pylon.” Although Jiggs did not look at once, the voice did, almost before the taller man spoke, as if it possessed some quality of omniscience beyond even vision:
“Well, well, folks, here’s a race that wasn’t advertised. It looks like Roger Shumann is going to try to upset the boys’ dope. That’s him that went up into third place on that pylon then; he has just taken Ott on the lake pylon. Let’s watch him now; Mrs Shumann’s here in the crowd somewhere: maybe she knows what Roger’s got up his sleeve today. A poor fourth on the first pylon and now coming in third on the third lap——oh oh oh, look at him take that pylon! If we were all back on the farm now I would say somebody has put a cockleburr under Roger’s—well, you know where: maybe it was Mrs Shumann did it. Good boy, Roger! If you can just hold Ott now because Ott’s got the ship on him, folks; I wouldn’t try to fool you about that—No; wait, w-a-i-t——Folks, he’s trying to catch Bullitt oh oh
did he take that pylon! Folks, he gained three hundred feet on Bullitt on that turn—Watch now, he’s going to try to take Bullitt on the next pylon—there there there—watch him WATCH him. He’s beating them on the pylons, folks, because he knows that on the straightaway he hasn’t got a chance oh oh oh watch him now, up there from fourth place in four and a half laps and now he is going to pass Bullitt unless he pulls his wings off on this next——Here they come in now oh oh oh, Mrs Shumann’s somewhere in the crowd here; maybe she told Roger if he dont come in on the money he needn’t come in at all——There it is, folks; here it is: Myers gets the flag and now it’s Shumann or Bullitt, Shumann or——It’s Shumann, folks, in as pretty a flown race as you ever watched——”
“There it is,” Jiggs said. “Jesus, he better had come in on somebody’s money or we’d a all set up in the depot tonight with our bellies thinking our throats was cut. Come on. I’ll help you put the ’chutes on.” But the taller man was looking up the apron. Jiggs paused too and saw the boy’s khaki garment riding high above the heads below the bandstand, though he could not actually see the woman. The six aeroplanes which for six minutes had followed one another around the course at one altitude and in almost undeviating order like so many beads on a string, were now scattered about the adjacent sky for a radius of two or three miles as if the last pylon had exploded them like so many scraps of paper, jockeying in to land.
“Who’s that guy?” the taller man said. “Hanging around Laverne?”
“Lazarus?” Jiggs said. “Jesus, if I was him I would be afraid to use myself. I would be even afraid to take myself out of bed, like I was a cutglass monkeywrench or something. Come on. Your guy is already warmed up and waiting for you.”
For a moment longer the taller man looked up the apron, bleakly. Then he turned. “Go and get the ’chutes and find somebody to bring the sack; I will meet—”
“They are already at the ship,” Jiggs said. “I done already carried them over. Come on.”
The other, moving, stopped dead still. He looked down at Jiggs with a bleak handsome face whose features were regular, brutally courageous, the expression quick if not particularly intelligent, not particularly strong. Under his eyes the faint smudges of dissipation appeared to have been put there by a makeup expert. He wore a narrow moustache above a mouth much more delicate and even feminine than that of the woman whom he and Jiggs called Laverne. “What?” he said. “You carried the ’chutes and that sack of flour over to the ship? You did?”
Jiggs did not stop. “You’re next, aint you? You’re ready to go, aint you? And it’s getting late, aint it? What are you waiting on? for them to turn on the boundary lights and maybe the floods? or maybe to have the beacon to come in on to land?”
The other walked again, following Jiggs along the apron toward where an aeroplane, a commercial type, stood just without the barrier, its engine running. “I guess you have been to the office and collected my twenty-five bucks and saved me some more time too,” he said.
“All right; I’ll attend to that too,” Jiggs said. “Come on. The guy’s burning gas; he’ll be trying to charge you six bucks instead of five if you dont snap it up.” They went on to where the aeroplane waited, the pilot already in his cockpit, the already low sun, refracted by the invisible propeller blades, shimmering about the nose of it in a faint coppercolored nimbus. The two parachutes and the sack of flour lay on the ground beside it. Jiggs held them up one at a time while the other backed into the harness, then he stooped and darted about the straps and buckles like a squirrel, still talking. “Yair, he come in on the money. I guess I will get my hooks on a little jack myself tonight. Jesus, I wont know how to count higher than two bucks.”
“But dont try to learn again on my twenty-five,” the other said. “Just get it and hold it until I get back.”
“What would I want with your twenty-five?” Jiggs said. “With Roger just won thirty percent. of three hundred and twenty-five, whatever that is. How do you think twenty-five bucks will look beside that?”
“I can tell you a bigger difference still,” the other said. “The money Roger won aint mine but this twenty-five is. Maybe you better not even collect it. I’ll attend to that, too.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, busy, bouncing on his short strong legs, snapping the buckles of the emergency parachute. “Yair, we’re jake now. We can eat and sleep again tonight.……O.K.” He stood back and the other waddled stiffly toward the aeroplane. The checker came up with his pad and took their names and the aeroplane’s number and went away.
“Where you want to land?” the pilot said.
“I dont care,” the jumper said. “Anywhere in the United States except that lake.”
“If you see you’re going to hit the lake,” Jiggs said, “turn around and go back up and jump again.”
They paid no attention to him. They were both looking back and upward toward where in the high drowsy azure there was already a definite alteration toward night. “Should be about dead up there now,” the pilot said. “What say I spot you for the hangar roofs and you can slip either way you want.”
“All right,” the jumper said. “Let’s get away from here.” With Jiggs shoving at him he climbed onto the wing and into the front cockpit and Jiggs handed up the sack of flour and the jumper took it onto his lap like it was a child; with his bleak humorless handsome face he looked exactly like the comely young bachelor caught by his girl while holding a strange infant on a street corner. The aeroplane began to move; Jiggs stepped back as the jumper leaned out, shouting: “Leave that money alone, you hear?”
“Okey doke,” Jiggs said. The aeroplane waddled out and onto the runway and turned and stopped; again the bomb, the soft slow bulb of cotton batting flowered against the soft indefinite lakehaze where for a little while still evening seemed to wait before moving in; again the report, the thud and jar twice reverberant against the stands as if the report bounced once before becoming echo: and now Jiggs turned as if he had waited for that signal too and almost parallel he and the aeroplane began to move—the stocky purposeful man, and the machine already changing angle and then lifting, banking in a long climbing turn. It was two thousand feet high when Jiggs shoved past the purple-and-gold guards at the main gate and through the throng huddled in the narrow underpass beneath the reserved seats, one of whom plucked at his sleeve:
“When’s the guy going to jump out of the parachute?”
“Not until he gets back down here,” Jiggs said, butting on past the other purple-and-gold guards and so into the rotundra itself and likewise not into the amplified voice again for the reason that he had never moved out of it:
“—still gaining altitude now; the ship has a long way to go yet. And then you will see a living man, a man like your—selves—a man like half of yourselves and that the other half of yourselves like, I should say—hurl himself into space and fall for almost four miles before pulling the ripcord of the parachute; by ripcord we mean the trigger that——” Once inside, Jiggs paused, looking swiftly about, breasting now with very immobility the now comparatively thin tide which still set toward the apron and talking to itself with one another in voices forlorn, baffled, and amazed:
“What is it now? What are they doing out there now?”
“Fella going to jump ten miles out of a parachute.”
“Better hurry too,” Jiggs said. “It may open before he can jump out of it.” The rotundra, filled with dusk, was lighted now, with a soft sourceless wash of no earthly color or substance and which cast no shadow: spacious, suave, sonorous and monastic, wherein relief or murallimning or bronze and chromium skilfully shadowlurked presented the furious, still, and legendary tale of what man has come to call his conquering of the infinite and impervious air. High overhead the dome of azure glass repeated the mosaiced twin Fsymbols of the runways to the brass twin Fs let into the tile floor and which, brightpolished, gleaming, seemed to reflect and find soundless and fading echo in turn monogrammed into the bronze grilling above the t
icket-and-information windows and inletted friezelike into baseboard and cornice of the synthetic stone. “Yair,” Jiggs said. “It must have set them back that million.—Say, mister, where’s the office?” The guard told him; he went to the small discreet door almost hidden in an alcove and entered it and for a time he walked out of the voice though it was waiting for him when, a minute later, he emerged:
“——still gaining altitude. The boys down here cant tell just how high he is but he looks about right. It might be any time now; you’ll see the flour first and then you will know there is a living man falling at the end of it, a living man falling through space at the rate of four hundred feet a second—” When Jiggs reached the apron again (he too had no ticket and so though he could pass from the apron into the rotundra as often as he pleased, he could not pass from the rotundra to the apron save by going around through the hangar) the aeroplane was no more than a trivial and insignificant blemish against the sky which was now definitely that of evening, seeming to hang there without sound or motion. But Jiggs did not look at it. He thrust on among the upgazing motionless bodies and reached the barrier just as one of the racers was being wheeled in from the field. He stopped one of the crew; the bill was already in his hand. “Monk, give this to Jackson, will you? For flying that parachute jump. He’ll know.”