“Now,” Jiggs said. “Pull.” The boot loosened, since it had already been worked at; Jiggs slipped it off. But when the left one came it gave way so suddenly that the reporter went over on his back, though this time he did not laugh; he lay there saying,
“It’s o.k. I aint going to laugh,” then he was looking up at Jiggs standing over him in a pair of cotton socks which, like the homemade putties of the morning, consisted of legs and insteps only.
“Get up,” Jiggs said, lifting the reporter.
“All right,” the reporter said. “Just make the room stop.” He began to struggle to stay down, but Jiggs hauled him up and he leaned outward against the arms which held him on his feet, toward the couch, the cot. “Wait till it comes around again,” he cried; then he lunged violently, sprawling onto the cot and then he could feel someone tumbling him onto the cot and he struggled again to be free, saying thickly through a sudden hot violent liquid mass in his mouth, “Look out! Look out! I’m on now. Let go!” Then he was free, though he could not move yet. Then he saw Jiggs lying on the floor next the wall, his back to the room and his head pillowed on the canvas sack and the parachute jumper at the slopped table, pouring from the jug. The reporter got up, unsteadily, though he spoke quite distinctly: “Yair. That’s the old idea. Little drink, hey?” He moved toward the table, walking carefully, his face wearing again the expression of bright and desperate recklessness, speaking apparently in soliloquy to an empty room: “But nobody to drink with now. Jiggs gone to bed and Roger gone to bed and Laverne cant drink tonight because Roger wont let her drink. See?” Now he looked at the jumper across the table, above the jug, the jam glasses, the dishpan, with that bright dissolute desperation though he still seemed to speak into an empty room: “Yair. It was Roger, see. Roger was the one that wouldn’t let her have anything to drink tonight, that took the glass out of her hand after a friend gave it to her. And so she and Roger have gone to bed. See?” They looked at one another.
“Maybe you wanted to go to bed with her yourself?” the jumper said. For a moment longer they looked at one another. The reporter’s face had changed. The bright recklessness was still there, but now it was overlaid with that abject desperation which, lacking anything better, is courage.
“Yes!” he cried. “Yes!” flinging himself backward and crossing his arms before his face at the same time; at first he did not even realise that it was only the floor which had struck him until he lay prone again, his arms above his face and head and looking between them at the feet of the parachute jumper who had not moved. He watched the jumper’s hand go out and strike the lamp from the table and then when the crash died he could see nothing and hear nothing, lying on the floor perfectly and completely passive and waiting. “Jesus,” he said quietly, “for a minute I thought you were trying to knock the jug off.” But there was no reply, and again his insides had set up that fierce maelstrom to which there was no focalpoint, not even himself. He lay motionless and waiting and felt the quick faint airblast and then the foot, the shoe, striking him hard in the side, once, and then he heard the jumper’s voice from above him speaking apparently from somewhere within the thick instability of the room, the darkness, whirling and whirling away, in a tone of quiet detachment saying the same words and in the same tone in which he had spoken them to Jiggs in the brothel six hours ago. They seemed to continue, to keep on speaking, clapping quietly down at him even after he knew by sound that the jumper had gone to the cot and stretched out on it; he could hear the quiet savage movements as the other arranged the dusty pillows and drew the blanket up. “That must be at least twelve times,” the reporter thought. “He must have called me a son of a bitch at least eight times after he went to sleep.—Yair,” he thought, “I told you. I’ll go, all right. But you will have to give me time, until I can get up and move.—Yair,” he thought, while the long vertiginous darkness completed a swirl more profound than any yet; now he felt the thick cold oil start and spring from his pores and which, when his dead hand found his dead face, did not sop up nor wipe away beneath the hand but merely doubled as though each drop were the atom which instantaneously divides not only into two equal parts but into two parts each of which is equal to the recent whole; “yesterday I talked myself out of a job, but tonight I seem to have talked myself out of my own house.” But at last he began to see: it was the dim shape of the window abruptly against some outer lightcolored space or air; vision caught, snagged and clung desperately and blindly like the pinafore of a child falling from a fence or a tree. On his hands and knees and still holding to the window by vision he found the table and got to his feet. He remembered exactly where he had put the key, carefully beneath the edge of the lamp, but now with the lamp gone his still nerveless hand did not feel the key at all when he knocked it from the table: it was hearing alone: the forlorn faint clink. He got down and found it at last and rose again, carefully, and wiped the key on the end of his necktie and laid it in the center of the table, putting it down with infinite care as though it were a dynamite cap, and found one of the sticky glasses and poured from the jug by sound and feel and raised the glass, gulping, while the icy almost pure alcohol channeled fiercely down his chin and seemed to blaze through his cold wet shirt and onto and into his flesh. It tried to come back at once; he groped to the stairs and down them, swallowing and swallowing the vomit which tried to fill his throat; and there was something else that he had intended to do which he remembered only when the door clicked irrevocably behind him and the cold thick predawn breathed against his damp shirt which had no coat to cover it and warm it. And now he could not recall at once what he had intended to do, where he had intended to go, as though destination and purpose were some theoretical point like latitude or time which he had passed in the hall, or something like a stamped and forgotten letter in the coat which he had failed to bring. Then he remembered; he stood on the cold flags, shaking with slow and helpless violence inside his wet shirt, remembering that he had started for the newspaper to spend the rest of the night on the floor of the now empty city room (he had done it before), having for the time forgotten that he was now fired. If he had been sober he would have tried the door, as people will, out of that vague hope for even though not belief in, miracles. But, drunk, he did not. He just began to move carefully away, steadying himself along the wall until he should get into motion good, waiting to begin again to try to keep the vomit swallowed, thinking quietly out of peaceful and profound and detached desolation and amazement: “Four hours ago they were out and I was in, and now it’s turned around exactly backward. It’s like there was a kind of cosmic rule for poverty like there is for waterlevel, like there has to be a certain weight of bums on park benches or in railroad waitingrooms waiting for morning to come or the world will tilt up and spill all of us wild and shrieking and grabbing like so many shooting stars, off into nothing.” But it would have to be a station, walls, even though he had long since surrendered to the shaking and felt no cold at all anymore. There were two stations, but he had never walked to either of them and he could not decide nor remember which was the nearer, when he stopped abruptly, remembering the Market, thinking of coffee. “Coffee,” he said. “Coffee. When I have had some coffee, it will be tomorrow. Yair. When you have had coffee, then it is already tomorrow and so you dont have to wait for it.”
He walked pretty well now, breathing with his mouth wide open as if he hoped (or were actually doing it) to soothe and quiet his stomach with the damp and dark and the cold. Now he could see the Market—a broad low brilliant wallless cavern filled with ranked vegetables as bright and impervious in appearance as artificial flowers, among which men in sweaters and women in men’s sweaters and hats too sometimes, with Latin faces still swollen with sleep and vapored faintly about the mouth and nostrils by breathing still warm from slumber, paused and looked at the man in shirtsleeves and loosened collar, with a face looking more than ever like that of a corpse roused and outraged out of what should have been the irrevocable and final sleep. He went on toward the c
offee stall; he felt fine now. “Yair, I’m all right now,” he thought, because almost at once he had quit trembling and shaking, and when at last the cup of hot pale liquid was set before him he told himself again that he felt fine; indeed, the very fact of his insistence to himself should have been intimation enough that things were not all right. And then he sat perfectly motionless, looking down at the cup in that rapt concern with which one listens to his own insides. “Jesus,” he thought. “Maybe I tried it too quick. Maybe I should have walked around a while longer.” But he was here, the coffee waited before him; already the counterman was watching him coldly. “And Jesus, I’m right; after a man has had his coffee it’s tomorrow: it has to be!” he cried, with no sound, with that cunning selfdeluding logic of a child. “And tomorrow it’s just a hangover; you aint still drunk tomorrow; tomorrow you cant feel this bad.” So he raised the cup as he had the final glass before he left home; he felt the hot liquid channeling down his chin too and striking through his shirt against his flesh; with his throat surging and trying to gag and his gaze holding desperately to the low cornice above the coffeeurn he thought of the cup exploding from his mouth, shooting upward and without trajectory like a champagne-cork; he put the cup down, already moving though not quite running, out of the stall and between the bright tables, passing from one to another by his hands like a monkey runs until he brought up against a table of strawberry boxes, holding to it without knowing why he had stopped nor when, while a woman in a black shawl behind the table repeated,
“How many, mister?” After a while he heard his mouth saying something, trying to.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il voulait?” a man’s voice said from the end of the table.
“D’ journal d’ matin,” the woman said.
“Donne-t-il,” the man said. The woman stooped and reappeared with a paper, folded back upon an inner sheet, and handed it to the reporter.
“Yair,” he said. “That’s it.” But when he tried to take it he missed it; it floated down between his and the woman’s hands, opening onto the first page. She folded it right now and he took it, swaying, holding to the table with the other hand, reading from the page in a loud declamatory voice: “Bankers strike! Farmers yacht! Quintuplets acreage! Reduction gains! ——No; wait.” He swayed, staring at the shawled woman with gaunt concentration. He fumbled in his pocket; the coins rang on the floor with the same sound which the key made, but now as he began to stoop the cold floor struck him a shocking blow on the face and then hands were holding him again while he struggled to rise. Now he was plunging toward the entrance; he caromed from the last table without even feeling it, the hot corrupted coffee gathering inside him like a big heavy bird beginning to fly as he plunged out the door and struck a lamppost and clung to it and surrendered as life, sense, all, seemed to burst out of his mouth as though his entire body were trying in one fierce orgasm to turn itself wrongsideout.
Now it was dawn. It had come unremarked; he merely realised suddenly that he could now discern faintly the words on the paper and that he now stood in a gray palpable substance without weight or light, leaning against the wall which he had not yet tried to leave. “Because I dont know whether I can make it yet or not,” he thought, with peaceful and curious interest as if he were engaged in a polite parlor game for no stakes; when he did move at last he seemed to blow leaflight along the graying wall to which he did not cling exactly but rather moved in some form of light slow attrition, like the leaf without quite enough wind to keep it in motion. The light grew steadily, without seeming to come from any one source or direction; now he could read the words, the print, quite well though they still had a tendency to shift and flow in smooth elusion of sense, meaning while he read them aloud: “Quintuplets bank.… No; there aint any pylon—Wait. Wait.……Yair, it was a pylon only it was pointed down and buried at the time and they were not quintuplets yet when they banked around it. ——Farmers bank. Yair. Farmer’s boy, two farmers’ boys, at least one from Ohio anyway she told me. And the ground they plow from Iowa; yair, two farmers’ boys downbanked; yair, two buried pylons in the one Iowadrowsing womandrowsing pylondrowsing.……No; wait.” He had reached the alley now and he would have to cross it since his doorway was in the opposite wall: so that now the paper was in the hand on the side which now clung creeping to the wall and he held the page up into the gray dawn as though for one last effort, concentrating sight, the vision without mind or thought, on the symmetrical line of boxheads: FARMERS REFUSE BANKERS DENY STRIKERS DEMAND PRESIDENT’S YACHT ACREAGE REDUCTION QUINTUPLETS GAIN EX-SENATOR RENAUD CELEBRATES TENTH ANNIVERSARY AS RESTAURATEUR—the fragile web of ink and paper, assertive, proclamative; profound and irrevocable if only in the sense of being profoundly and irrevocably unimportant—the dead instant’s fruit of forty tons of machinery and an entire nation’s antic delusion. The eye, the organ without thought speculation or amaze, ran off the last word and then, ceasing again, vision went on ahead and gained the door beneath the balcony and clung and completely ceased. “Yair,” the reporter thought. “I’m almost there but still I dont know if I am going to make it or not.”
Tomorrow
It was a foot in his back prodding him that waked Jiggs. He rolled over to face the room and the daylight and saw Shumann standing over him, dressed save for his shirt, and the parachute jumper awake too, lying on his side on the couch with the Indian blanket drawn to his chin and across his feet the rug which last night had been on the floor beside the cot. “It’s half past eight,” Shumann said. “Where’s what’s his name?”
“Where’s who?” Jiggs said. Then he sat up, bounced up into sitting, his feet in the socklegs projecting before him as he looked about the room in surprised recollection. “Jesus, where is he?” he said. “I left him and Jack—Jesus, his boss came down here about three oclock and said for him to be somewhere at work at ten oclock.” He looked at the parachute jumper, who might have been asleep save for his open eyes. “What became of him?” he said.
“How should I know?” the jumper said. “I left him lying there on the floor, about where you are standing,” he said to Shumann. Shumann looked at the jumper too.
“Were you picking on him again?” he said.
“Yair he was,” Jiggs said. “So that’s what you were staying awake until I went to sleep for.” The jumper did not answer. They watched him throw the blanket and the rug back and rise, dressed as he had been the night before—coat vest and tie—save for his shoes; they watched him put the shoes on and stand erect again and contemplate his now wrinkled trousers in bleak and savage immobility for a moment, then turn toward the faded theatre curtain.
“Going to wash,” he said. Shumann watched Jiggs, seated now, delve into the canvas sack and take out the tennis shoes and the bootlegs which he had worn yesterday and put his feet into the shoes. The new boots sat neatly, just the least bit wrinkled about the ankles, against the wall where Jiggs’ head had been. Shumann looked at the boots and then at the worn tennis shoes which Jiggs was lacing, but he said nothing: he just said,
“What happened last night? Did Jack——”
“Nah,” Jiggs said. “They were all right. Just drinking. Now and then Jack would try to ride him a little, but I told him to let him alone. And Jesus, his boss said for him to be at work at ten oclock. Have you looked down stairs? Did you look under the bed in there? Maybe he——”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “He aint here.” He watched Jiggs now forcing the tennis shoes slowly and terrifically through the bootlegs, grunting and cursing. “How do you expect them to go on over the shoes?”
“How in hell would I get the strap on the outside of the shoes if I didn’t?” Jiggs said. “You ought to know what become of him; you wasn’t drunk last night, were you? I told his boss I would——”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “Go back and wash.” With his legs drawn under him to rise Jiggs paused and glanced at his hands for an instant.
“I washed good at the hotel last night,” he said. He began to rise,
then he stopped and took from the floor a halfsmoked cigarette and bounced up, already reaching into his shirt pocket as he came up facing the table. With the stub in his mouth and the match in his hand, he paused. On the table, amid the stained litter of glasses and matches burnt and not burnt and ashes which surrounded the jug and the dishpan, lay a pack of cigarettes, another of those which the reporter had bought last night. Jiggs put the stub into his shirt pocket and reached for the pack. “Jesus,” he said, “during the last couple months I have got to where a whole cigarette aint got any kick to it.” Then his hand paused again, but for less than a watchtick, and Shumann watched it go on to the jug’s neck while the other hand broke free from the table’s sticky top the glass, the same from which the reporter had drunk in the darkness.
“Leave that stuff alone,” Shumann said. He looked at the blunt watch on his naked wrist. “It’s twenty to nine. Let’s get out of here.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, pouring into the glass. “Get your clothes on; let’s go check them valves. Jesus, I told the guy’s boss I would——Say, I found out last night what his name is. Jesus, you wouldn’t never guess in.……” He stopped; he and Shumann looked at one another.
“Off again, huh?” Shumann said.
“I’m going to take one drink, that I saved out from last night to take this morning. Didn’t you just say let’s get out to the field? How in hell am I going to get anything to drink out there, even if I wanted it, when for Christ’s sake the only money I have had in three months I was accused of stealing it? When the only guy that’s offered me a drink in three months we took both his beds away from him and left him the floor to sleep on and now we never even kept up with him enough to deliver a message from his boss where he is to go to work——”
“One drink, huh?” Shumann said. “There’s a slop jar back there; why not get it and empty the jug into it and take a good bath?” He turned away. Jiggs watched him lift the curtain aside and pass beyond it. Then Jiggs began to raise the glass, making already the preliminary grimace and shudder, when he paused again. This time it was the key where the reporter had carefully placed it and beside which Shumann had set the broken lamp which he had raised from the floor. Touching the key, Jiggs found it too vulcanised lightly to the table’s top by spilt liquor.