So he raised the cup as he had the final glass before he left home; he felt the hot liquid channelling 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 coffee-urn 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 awhile 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 stopped 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 on to 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 lamp-post and clinging to it 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 wrong side out.
Now it was dawn. It had come unremarked; he merely realized suddenly that he could now discern faintly the words on the paper and that he now stood in a grey palpable substance without weight or light, leaning against the wall which he had not yet tried to leave. “Because I don’t know whether I can make it yet or not,” he thought, with peaceful and curious interest as if he were engaged in a polite parlour game for no stakes. When he did move at last he seemed to blow leaf light along the greying wall to which he did not exactly cling 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 ain’t 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 plough from Iowa; yair, two farmers’ boys down banked; yair, two buried pylons in the one Iowa drowsing woman drowsing pylon drowsing....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 grey dawn as though for one last effort, concentrating sight, the vision without mind or thought, on the symmetrical line of box heads:
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 don’t know if I am going to make it or not.”
To-Morrow
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 sock legs 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 o’clock and said for him to be somewhere at work at ten o’clock.” 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 towards 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 boot legs 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 o’clock. Have you looked downstairs? Did you look under the bed in there? Maybe he —— —”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “He ain’t here.” He watched Jiggs now forcing the tennis shoes slowly and terrifically through the boot legs, 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 half-smoked 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 dish-pan, lay a pack of cigarettes, another of those which the reporter had bought last night. Jiggs put the stub in his shirt pocket and reached for the pack. “Jesus,” he said, “during the last couple months I have got to where a whole cigarette ain’t got any kick to it.” Then his hand paused again, but for less than a watch-tick, 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 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?” Shumannn 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? 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, vulcanized lightly to the table’s top by spilt liquor.
“He must be here, then,” he said. “But for Christ’s sake where?” He looked about the room again; suddenly he went to the couch and lifted the tumbled blanket and looked under the cot. “He must be somewheres though,” he thought. “Maybe behind the baseboard. Jesus, he wouldn’t make no more bulge behind it than a snake would.” He went back to the table and raised the glass again; this time it was the woman and the little boy. She was dressed, the trench-coat belted; she gave the room a single pale comprehensive glance, then she looked at him, brief, instantaneous, blank. “Drinking a little breakfast,” he said.
“You mean supper,” she said. “You’ll be asleep in two hours.”
“Did Roger tell you we have mislaid the guy?” he said.
“Go on and drink it,” she said. “It’s almost nine o’clock. We have got to pull all those valves to-day.” But again he did not get the glass to his mouth. Shumann was also dressed now. Across the arrested glass Jiggs watched the jumper go to the bags and jerk them and then the boots out into the floor and then turn upon Jiggs, snarling:
“Go on. Drink it.”
“Don’t either of them know where he went?” the woman said. “I don’t know,” Shumann said. “They say they don’t.”
“I told you No,” the jumper said. “I didn’t do anything to him. He flopped down there on the floor and I put the light out and went to bed and Roger woke me up and he was gone and it’s damned high time we were doing the same thing if we are going to get those valves miked and back in the engine before three o’clock.”
“Yair,” Shumann said, “he can find us if he wants us. We are easier, for him to find than he is for us to find.” He took one of the bags; the jumper already had the other. “Go on,” he said, without looking at Jiggs. “Drink it and come on.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Let’s get started.” He drank now and set the glass down while the others moved towards the stairs and began to descend. Then he looked at his hands; he looked at them as if he had just discovered he had them and had not yet puzzled out what they were for. “Jesus, I had better wash,” he said. “You all go ahead; I’ll catch you before you get to the bus stop.”
“Sure; to-morrow,” the jumper said. “Take the jug too. No; leave it. If he’s going to lay around drunk all day long too, better here than out there in the way.” He was last; he kicked the boots savagely out of his path. “What are you going to do with these — carry them in your hands?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Until I get them paid for.”
“Paid for? I thought you did that yesterday, with my—”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “So I did.”
“Come on, come on,” Shumann said from the stairs. “Go on, Laverne.” The jumper went on to the stairs, Shumann now herded them all before him. Then he paused and looked back at Jiggs, dressed, neat, profoundly serious beneath the new hat which Jiggs might still have been looking at through plate glass. “Listen,” he said. “Are you starting out on a bat to-day? I ain’t trying to stop you because I know I can’t, I have tried that before. I just want you to tell me so I can get somebody else to help Jack and me pull those valves.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” Jiggs said. “Jesus, don’t I know we are in a jam as well as you do? You all go on; I’ll wash up and catch you before you get to Main Street.” They went on; Shumann’s bat sank from sight. Then Jiggs moved with rubber-soled and light celerity. He caught up the boots and passed on beyond the curtain and into a cramped alcove hung with still more blankets and pieces of frayed and faded dyed or painted cloth enigmatic of significance and inscrutable of purpose, and containing a chair, a table, a washstand, a chest of drawers bearing a celluloid comb and two ties such as might be salvaged from a trashbin but for the fact that anyone who would have salvaged them would not wear ties, and a bed neatly made up, so neatly restored that it shouted the fact that it had been recently occupied by a woman who did not live there. Jiggs went to the washstand but it was not his hands and face that he bathed. It was the boots, examining with grim concern a long scratch across the instep of the right one where he believed that he could even discern the reversed trademark of the assaulting heel-tap, scrubbing at the mark with the damp towel. “Maybe it won’t show through a shine,” he thought. “Anyway I can be glad the bastard wasn’t a football player.” It did not improve any now, however, so he wiped both the boots, upper and sole, and hung the now filthy towel carefully and neatly back and returned to the other room. He may have looked at the jug in passing, but first he put the boots carefully into the canvas sack before going to the table.
He could have heard sounds, even voices, from the alley beneath the window if he had been listening. But he was not.
All he heard now was that thunderous silence and solitude in which man’s spirit crosses the eternal repetitive rubicon of his vice in the instant after the terror and before the triumph becomes dismay — the moral and spiritual waif shrieking his feeble I-am-I into the desert of chance and disaster. He raised the jug; his hot bright eyes watched the sticky glass run almost half full; he gulped it, raw, scooping blindly the stale and trashladen water from the dish-pan and gulping that too; for one fierce and immolated instant he thought about hunting and finding a bottle which he could fill and carry with him in the bag along with the boots, the soiled shirt, the sweater, the cigar box containing a cake of laundry soap and a cheap straight razor and a pair of pliers and a spool of safety wire, but he did not. “Be damned if I will,” he cried silently, even while his now ruthless inside was telling him that within the hour he would regret it; “be damned if I will steal any man’s whiskey behind his back,” he cried, catching up the sack and hurrying down the stairs, fleeing at least from temptation’s protagonist, even if it was rather that virtue which is desire’s temporary assuagement than permanent annealment, since he did not want the drink right now and so when he did begin to want it, he would be at least fifteen miles away from the particular jug. It was not the present need for another drink that he was running from. “I ain’t running from that,” he told himself, hurrying down the corridor towards the street door.
“It’s because even if I am a burn there is some muck I will not eat,” he cried out of the still white glare of honour and even pride, jerking the door open and then leaping up and outward as the reporter, the last night’s missing host, tumbled slowly into the corridor at Jigg’s feet as he had at the feet of the others when the parachute jumper opened the door fi
ve minutes before. Shumann had dragged the reporter up and the door of its own weight swung to behind them; the reporter half lay again in the frame of it, his nondescript hair broken down about his brow and his eyes closed and peaceful, his shirt and awry tie stiff and sour with vomit. When Jiggs in turn jerked open the door once more the reporter tumbled slowly sideways into the corridor as Shumann caught him and Jiggs hurdled them both as the door swung to with its own weight and locked itself.
Whereupon something curious and unpresaged happened to Jiggs. It was not that his purpose had flagged or intention and resolution had reversed, switched back on him. It was as though the entire stable world across which he hurried from temptation, victorious and in good faith and unwarned, had reversed ends while he was in mid-air above the two men in the doorway; as though his own body had become corrupt too and without consulting him at all had made that catlike turn in mid-air and presented to him the blank and now irrevocable panel upon which like on the screen he saw the jug sitting on the table in the empty room above plain enough to have touched it. “Catch that door!” he cried; he seemed to bounce back to it before even touching the flags, scrabbling at its blank surface with his hands. “Why didn’t somebody catch it?” he cried. “Why in hell didn’t you holler?” But they were not even looking at him; now the parachute jumper stooped with Shumann over the reporter. “What?” Jiggs said. “Breakfast, huh?” They did not even look at him.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 181