Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “Yair. The third guy, the horse one, is just the mechanic; he ain’t even a husband, let alone a flyer. Yair. Shumann and the aeroplane landing at Iowa or Indiana or wherever it is, and her coming out of the schoolhouse without even arranging to have her books took home, and they went off maybe with a can opener and a blanket to sleep on under the wing of the aeroplane when it rained hard; and then the other guy, the parachute guy, dropping in, falling the couple or three miles with his sack of flour before pulling the ripcord. They ain’t human, you see. No ties; no place where you were born and have to go back to it now and then even if it’s just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two. From coast to coast and Canada in summer and Mexico in winter, with one suitcase and the same can opener because three can live on one can opener as easy as one or twelve. — Wherever they can find enough folks in one place to advance them enough money to get there and pay for the gasoline afterward. Because they don’t need money; it ain’t money they are after any more than it’s glory because the glory can only last until the next race and so maybe it ain’t until to-morrow. And they don’t need money except only now and then when they come in contact with the human race like in a hotel to sleep or eat now and then or maybe to buy a pair of pants or a skirt to keep the police off of them. Because money ain’t that hard to make: it ain’t up there, fourteen and a half feet off the ground in a vertical bank around a steel post at two or three hundred miles an hour in a damn gnat built like a Swiss watch that the top speed of ain’t just a number on a little dial but where you burn the engine up or fly out from between the wings and the under-carriage. Around the home pylon on one wing-tip and the fabric trembling like a bride and the crate cost four thousand dollars and good for maybe fifty hours if one ever lasted that long and five of them in the race and the top money at least two-hundred-thirty-eight-fifty-two, less fines, fees, commissions and gratuities. And the rest of them, the wives and children and mechanics, standing on the apron and watching like they might have been stole out of a department store window and dressed in greasy khaki coveralls and not even thinking about the hotel bill over in town or where we are going to eat if we don’t win and how we are going to get to the next meet if the engine melts and runs backward out of the exhaust pipe.

  “And Shumann don’t even own a ship; she told me about how they want Vic Chance to build one for them and how Vic Chance wants to build one for Shumann to fly, only neither Vic Chance nor them have managed to save up enough jack yet. So he just flies whatever he can get that they will qualify. This one he copped with to-day he is flying on a commission; it was next to the slowest one in the race and they all said he never had a chance with it and he beat them on the pylons. So when he don’t cop they eat on the parachute guy, which is O.K. because the parachute guy makes almost as much as the guy at the microphone does, besides the mike guy having to work all afternoon for his while it don’t only take the parachute guy a few seconds to fall the ten or twelve thousand feet with the flour blowing back in his face before pulling the ripcord.

  “And so the kid was born on an unrolled parachute in a hangar in California; he got dropped already running like a colt or a calf from the fuselage of an aeroplane, on to something because it happened to be big enough to land on and then take off again. And I thought about him having ancestors and hell and heaven like we have, and birth-pangs to rise up out of and walk the earth with your arm crooked over your head to dodge until you finally get the old blackjack at last and can lay back down again — All of a sudden I thought about him with a couple or three sets of grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins somewhere, and I like to died. I had to stop and lean against the hangar wall and laugh. Talk about your immaculate conceptions: born on a unrolled parachute in a California hangar and the doc went to the door and called Shumann and the parachute guy. And the parachute guy got out the dice and says to her ‘Do you want to catch these?’ and she said ‘Roll them’ and the dice come out and Shumann rolled high, and that afternoon they fetched the J.P. out on the gasoline truck and so hers and the kid’s name is Shumann. And they told me how it wasn’t them that started saying ‘Who’s your old man?” to the kid; it was her, and the kid flailing away at her and her stooping that hard boy’s face that looks like any one of the four of them might cut her hair for her with a pocket knife when it needs it, down to where he can reach it and saying ‘Hit me. Hit me hard. Harder. Harder.’ And what do you think of that?”

  He stopped again. The editor sat back in the swivel chair and drew a deep, full, deliberate breath while the reporter leaned above the desk like a dissolute and eager skeleton, with that air of worn and dreamy fury which Don Quixote must have had.

  “I think you ought to write it,” the editor said. The reporter looked at him for almost half a minute without moving.

  “Ought to write—” He murmured. “Ought to write...”

  His voice died away in ecstasy; he glared down at the editor in bone-light exultation while the editor watched him in turn with cold and vindictive waiting.

  “Yes. Go home and write it.”

  “Go home and... Home, where I won’t be dis — where I can... O pal, o pal, o pal! Chief, where have I been all your life or where have you been all mine?”

  “Yes,” the editor said. He had not moved. “Go home and lock yourself in and throw the key out the window and write it.” He watched the gaunt ecstatic face before him in the dim corpse glare of the green shade. “And then set fire to the room.” The reporter’s face sank slowly back, like a Halloween mask on a boy’s stick being slowly withdrawn. Then for a long time he too did not move save for a faint working of the lips as if he were tasting something either very good or very bad. Then he rose slowly, the editor watching him; he seemed to collect and visibly reassemble himself bone by bone and socket by socket. On the desk lay a pack of cigarettes. He reached his hand towards it; as quickly as when he had flung back the hat and without removing his gaze from the reporter’s face, the editor snatched the pack away. The reporter lifted from the floor his disreputable hat and stood gazing into it with musing attention, as though about to draw a lot from it. “Listen,” the editor said; he spoke patiently, almost kindly: “The people who own this paper or who direct its policies or anyway who pay the salaries, fortunately or unfortunately I shan’t attempt to say, have no Lewises or Hemingways or even Tchekovs on the staff: one very good reason doubtless being that they do not want them, since what they want is not fiction, not even Nobel Prize fiction, but news.

  “You mean you don’t believe this?” the reporter said. “About h — these guys?”

  “I’ll go you better than that: I don’t even care. Why should I find news in this woman’s supposed bed habits as long as her legal (so you tell me) husband does not?”

  “I thought that women’s bed habits were always news,” the reporter said.

  “You thought? You thought?. You listen to me a minute. If one of them takes his aeroplane or his parachute and murders her and the child in front of the grand-stand, then it will be news. But until they do, what I am paying you to bring back here is not what you think about somebody out there nor what you heard about somebody out there nor even what you saw: I expect you to come in here to-morrow night with an accurate account of everything that occurs out there to-morrow that creates any reaction excitement or irritation on any human retina; if you have to be twins or triplets or even a regiment to do this, be so. Now you go on home and go to bed. And remember. Remember. There will be someone out there to report to me personally at my home the exact moment at which you enter the gates. And if that report comes to me one minute after ten o’clock, you will need a racing aeroplane to catch your job Monday morning. Go home. Do you hear me?” The reporter looked at him, without heat, perfectly blank, as if he had ceased several moments ago not alone to listen but even to hear, as though he were now watching the editor’s lips courteously to tell when he had finished.

  “O.K., chief,” he said. “If that’s the
way you feel about it.”

  “That’s exactly the way I feel about it. Do you understand?”

  “Yair; sure. Good night.”

  “Good night,” the editor said. The reporter turned away; he turned away quietly, putting the hat on his head exactly as he had laid it on the editor’s desk before the editor flung it off, and took from the pocket containing the folded newspaper a crumpled cigarette pack. The editor watched him put the cigarette into his mouth and then tug the incredible hat to a raked dissolute angle as he passed out the door, raking the match across the frame as he disappeared. But the first match broke; the second one he struck on the bell-plate while the elevator was rising. The door opened and clashed behind him; already his hand was reaching into his pocket while with the other he lifted the top paper from the shallow stack on the second stool beside the one on which the elevator man sat, sliding the face-down dollar watch which weighted it on to the next one, the same, the identical: black harsh and restrained:

  FIRST FATALITY OF AIR MEET PILOT BURNED ALIVE

  Lieut. Frank Burnham in Crash of Rocket Plane

  He held the paper off, his face tilted aside, his eyes squinted against the smoke. “‘Shumann surprises spectators by beating Bullitt for second place,’” he read. “What do you think of that, now?”

  “I think they are all crazy,” the elevator man said. He had not looked at the reporter again. He received the coin into the same hand which clutched a dead stained cob pipe, not looking at the other. “Them that do it and them that pay money to see it.” Neither did the reporter look at him.

  “Yair; surprised,” the reporter said, looking at the paper. Then he folded it and tried to thrust it into the pocket with the other folded one just like it. “Yair. And in one more lap he would have surprised them still more by beating Myers for first place.” The cage stopped. “Yair; surprised.... What time is it?” With the hand which now held both the coin and the pipe the elevator man lifted the face-down watch and held it out. He said nothing, he didn’t even look at the reporter; he just sat there, waiting, holding the watch out with a kind of weary patience like a house guest showing his watch to the last of several children. “Two minutes past ten?” the reporter said. “Just two minutes past ten? Hell.”

  “Get out of the door,” the elevator man said. “There’s a draught in here.” It clashed behind the reporter again; as he crossed the lobby he tried again to thrust the paper into the pocket with the other one. Antic, repetitive, his reflection in the glass street doors glared and flicked away. The street was empty, though even here, fourteen minutes afoot from Grandlieu Street, the February darkness was murmurous with faint uproar, with faint and ordered pandemonium. Overhead, beyond the palm tufts, the overcast sky reflected that interdict and light-glared canyon now adrift with serpentine and confetti, through which the floats, bearing grimacing and antic mimes dwarfed chalk white and forlorn and contemplated by static kerb mass of amazed confetti faces, passed as though through steady rain. He walked, not fast exactly but with a kind of loose and purposeless celerity, as though it were not exactly faces that he sought but solitude that he was escaping, or even as if he actually were going home like the editor had told him, thinking already of Grandlieu Street which he would have to cross somehow in order to do so. “Yah,” he thought, “he should have sent me home by air mail.” As he passed from light to light his shadow in midstride resolved, pacing him, on pavement and wall. In a dark plate window, sidelooking, he walked beside himself; stopping and turning so that for the moment shadow and reflection superposed, he stared full at himself as though he still saw the actual shoulder sagging beneath the dead afternoon’s phantom burden, and saw reflected beside him yet the sweater and the skirt and the harsh pallid hair as, bearing upon his shoulder the arch-fathered, he walked beside the oblivious and arch-adulteress.

  “Yah,” he thought, “the damn little yellow-headed bastard.

  .. Yair, going to bed, now, to sleep; the three of them in one bed or maybe they take it night about or maybe you just put your hat down on it first like in a barber shop.” He faced himself in the dark glass, long and light and untidy as a bundle of laths dressed in human garments. “Yah,” he thought, “the poor little tow-headed son of a bitch.” When he moved it was to recoil from an old man almost overwalked — a face, a stick, a suit filthier even than his own. He extended the two folded papers along with the coin. “Here, pop,” he said. “Maybe you can get another dime for these. You can buy a big beer then.”

  When he reached Grandlieu Street he discovered that the only way he could cross it would be by air, though even now he had not actually paused to decide whether he were really going home or not. And this, not alone because of police regulations but because of the physical kerb mass of heads and shoulders in moiling silhouette against the light glare, the serpentine and confetti-drift, the antic passing floats. But even before he reached the corner he was assailed by a gust of screaming newsboys apparently as oblivious to the moment’s significance as birds are aware yet oblivious to the human doings which their wings brush and their droppings fall upon. They swirled about him, screaming: in the reflected light of the passing torches the familiar black thick type and the raucous cries seemed to glare and merge faster than the mind could distinguish the sense through which each had been received: “Boinum Boins!” FIRST FATALITY OF AIR. “Read about it! Foist Moidigror foitality!” LIEUT. BURNHAM KILLED IN AIR CRASH. “Boinum Boins!”

  “Naw!” the reporter cried. “Beat it! Should I throw away a nickel like it was into the ocean because another lunatic has fried himself? — Yah,” he thought, vicious, savage, “even they will have to sleep some of the time just to pass that much of the dark half of being alive. Not to rest because they have to race again to-morrow, but because like now air and space ain’t passing them fast enough and time is passing them too fast to rest in except during the six and a half minutes it takes to go the twenty-five miles, and the rest of them standing there on the apron like that many window dummies because the rest of them ain’t even there, like in the girls’ school where one of them is gone off first with all the fine clothes. Yair, alive only for six and a half minutes a day in one aeroplane. And so every night they sleep in one bed, and why shouldn’t either of them or both of them at once come drowsing unawake in one woman-drowsing and none of the three of them know which one nor care?... Yah,” he thought, “maybe I was going home, after all.” Then he saw Jiggs, the pony man, the man-pony of the afternoon, recoiled now into the centre of a small violent backwater of motionless back-turned faces.

  “Why don’t you use your own feet to walk on?” Jiggs snarled.

  “Excuse me,” one of the faces said. “I didn’t mean...”

  “Well, watch yourself,” Jiggs cried. “Mine have got to last me to the end of my life. And likely even then I will have to walk a ways before I can catch a ride.” The reporter watched him stand on alternate legs and scrub at his feet in turn with his cap, presenting to the smoky glare of the passing torches a bald spot neat as a tonsure and the colour of saddle leather. As they stood side by side and looked at one another they resembled the tall and the short man of the orthodox and unfailing comic team — the one looking like a cadaver out of a medical school vat and dressed for the moment in garments out of a flood refugee warehouse, the other filling his clothing without any fraction of surplus cloth which might be pinched between two fingers, with that trim vicious economy of wrestlers’ tights. Again Jiggs thought, since it had been good the first time, “Jesus. Don’t they open the graveyards until midnight either?” About the two of them now the newsboys hovered and screamed:

  “Globe Stoytsman! Boinum boins!”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Burn to death on Thursday night or starve to death on Friday morning. So this is Moddy Graw. Why ain’t I where I have been all my life.” But the reporter continued to glare down at him in bright amazement.

  “At the Terrebonne?” he said. “She told me this afternoon you all had some roo
ms down in French town. You mean to tell me that just because he won a little money this afternoon he has got to pick up and move over to the hotel this time of night when he ought to been in bed an hour ago so he can fly to-morrow?”

  “I don’t mean nothing, mister,” Jiggs said. “I just said I saw Roger and Laverne go into that hotel up the street a minute ago. I never asked them what for.... How about that cigarette?” The reporter gave it to him from the crumpled pack. Beyond the barricade of heads and shoulders, in the ceaseless rain of confetti, the floats moved past with an air esoteric, almost apocryphal, without inference of motion, like an inhabited archipelago putting out to sea on a flood tide. And now another newsboy, a new face, young, ageless, the teeth gaped raggedly as though he had found them one by one over a period of years about the streets, shrieked at them a new sentence like a kind of desperate ace:

  “Laughing Boy in fit at Woishndon Poik!”

  “Yair!” the reporter cried, glaring down at Jiggs. “Because you guys don’t need to sleep. You ain’t human. I reckon the way he trains for a meet is to stay out on the town all the night before. Besides that — what was it? — thirty per cent, of three hundred and twenty-five dollars he won this afternoon.... Come on,” he said. “We won’t have to cross the street.”

  “I thought you were going home so fast,” Jiggs said.

  “Yair,” the reporter cried back over his shoulder, seeming not to penetrate the static human mass but to filter through it like a phantom, without alteration or diminution of bulk; now, turned sideways to cry back at Jiggs, passing between the individual bodies like a playing card, he cried, “I have to sleep at night. I ain’t a racing pilot; I ain’t got an aeroplane to sleep in; I can’t concentrate twenty-five miles of space at three miles an hour into six and a half minutes. Come on.” The hotel was not far and the side, the carriage, entrance was comparatively clear in the outfalling of light beneath a suave canopy with its lettered frieze: Hotel Terrebonne. Above this from a jack-staff hung an oilcloth painted tabard: Headquarters, American-Aeronautical Association. Dedication Meet, Feinman Airport. “Yair,” the reporter cried, “they’ll be here. Here’s where to find guys that don’t aim to sleep at the hotel. Yair; tiered identical cubicles of one thousand rented sleepings. And if you just got jack enough to last out the night you don’t even have to go to bed.”