Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “All right,” Jiggs said.

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “Whatever you want me to do.” Then Shumann looked at him and saw him trying to hold the cigarette to his mouth with both hands, and that the cigarette was dead.

  “What do you want?” Shumann said.

  “I want a drink,” Jiggs said quietly.

  “Do you have to have one?”

  “I guess I don’t if I can’t get one.” Shumann watched him holding the dead cigarette to his mouth, drawing at it.

  “If I give you a drink, will you eat something?”

  “Yair. I’ll do anything.” Shumann leaned forward and tapped on the glass. The driver turned his head.

  “Where can I get something to eat?” Shumann said. “A bowl of soup?”

  “You’ll have to go back up towards Grandlieu for that.”

  “Ain’t there any place close around here?”

  “You can get a ham sandwich at these wop stores, if you can find one open.”

  “All right. Stop at the next one you see, will you?” It was not far; Shumann recognized the corner, though he asked to be sure as they got out. “Noy-dees Street ain’t far from here, is it?”

  “Noyades?” the driver said. “That’s it in the next block there. On the right.”

  “We’ll get out here then,” Shumann said. He drew out the crumpled money which the reporter had given him, glancing down at the plump neat figure five in the corner. “That makes eleven-seventy,” he thought, then he discovered a second bill crumpled into the first one; he passed it to the driver, still looking at the compact “5” on the one in his hand. “Damn,” he thought, “that’s seventeen dollars,” as the driver spoke to him:

  “It’s just two-fifteen. Ain’t you got anything smaller than this?”

  “Smaller?” Shumann said. He looked at the bill in the driver’s hand, held so that the light from the meter fell upon it. It was a ten. “No,” he thought; he didn’t even swear now. “It’s twenty-two dollars.” The store was a room the size, shape and temperature of a bank vault. It was illuminated by one kerosene lamp which seemed to cast not light but shadows, out of whose brown Rembrandt gloom the hushed bellies of ranked cans gleamed behind a counter massed with an unbelievable quantity of indistinguishable objects which the proprietor must vend by feel alone to distinguish not only object from object but object from chiaroscuro. It smelled of cheese and garlic and of heated metal; sitting on either side of a small fiercely burning kerosene heater a man and a woman, whom Shumann had not seen until now, both wrapped in shawls and distinguishable by gender only because the man wore a cap, looked up at him. The sandwich was the end of a hard French loaf, with ham and cheese. He gave it to Jiggs and followed him out, where Jiggs stopped again and stood looking at the object in his hand with a sort of ox-like despair.

  “Could I have the drink first?” he said.

  “You eat while we walk home,” Shumann said. “I’ll give you the drink later.”

  “It would be better if I had the drink first,” Jiggs said.

  “Yes,” Shumann said. “You thought that this morning too.”

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. “That’s right.” He became motionless again, looking at the sandwich.

  “Go on,” Shumann said. “Eat it.”

  “All right,” Jiggs said. He began to eat; Shumann watched him bring the sandwich to his mouth with both hands and turn his face sideways to bite into it; he could see Jiggs shaking and jerking all over now as he worried the bite off and began to chew. Chewing, Jiggs looked full at Shumann, holding the bitten sandwich in both grimed hands before his breast as though it were a crucifix, chewing with his mouth open, looking full at Shumann until Shumann realized that Jiggs was not looking at him at all, that the one good eye was merely open and filled with a profound and hopeless abnegation as if the despair which both eyes should have divided between them had now to be concentrated and contained in one alone, and that Jiggs’ face was now slicked over with something which in the faint light resembled oil in the instant before Jiggs began to vomit. Shumann held him up, holding the sandwich clear with the other hand, while Jiggs’ stomach continued to go through the motions of refusal long after there was nothing left to abdicate.

  “Try to stop it now,” Shumann said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth.

  “Here,” Shumann said. He extended his handkerchief. Jiggs took it, but at once he reached his hand again, groping. “What?” Shumann said.

  “The sandwich.”

  “Could you hold it down if you had a drink?”

  “I could do anything if I had a drink,” Jiggs said.

  “Come on,” Shumann said. When they entered the alley they could see the outfall of light from the window beyond the balcony as Hagood had seen it last night, though there was now no arm shadow, no voice. Shumann halted beneath the balcony. “Jack,” he said. “Laverne.” But still there was nothing to see: just the parachute jumper’s voice from beyond the window:

  “It’s off the latch. Lock it when you come in.” When they came up the stairs the jumper was sitting on the cot, in his underclothes, his clothing arranged neatly on a chair and his foot on the chair too while with a stained wad of cotton he swabbed liquid from a bottle into the long raw abrasion like a paint smear from his ankle to his thigh. On the floor lay the bandage and tape which he had worn in from the airport. He had already arranged the cot for the night; the blanket was turned neatly back and the rug from the floor spread over the foot.

  “You better sleep in the bed to-night,” Shumann said. “That blanket will give that skinned place hell.” The jumper did not answer, bent over his leg, swabbing the medicine in with a sort of savage concentration. Shumann turned; he seemed to notice for the first time the sandwich in his hand and then to remember Jiggs who now stood quietly beside his canvas bag, watching Shumann quietly and patiently with the one eye, with that patient inarticulate quality of a dog. “Oh yes,” Shumann said, turning on towards the table. The jug still sat there, though the glasses and the dish-pan were gone and the jug itself appeared to have been washed. “Get a glass and some water,” he said. When the curtain fell behind Jiggs, Shumann laid the sandwich on the table and looked at the jumper again. After a moment the jumper looked up at him.

  “Well?” the jumper said. “What about it?”

  “I guess I can get it,” Shumann said.

  “You mean you didn’t see Ord?”

  “Yair. We found him.”

  “Suppose you do get it. How are you going to get it qualified in time to race to-morrow?”

  “I don’t know,” Shumann said. He lit a cigarette. “He said he could get that fixed up. I don’t know, myself.”

  “How? Does the race committee think he is Jesus too, the same as the rest of you do?”

  “I said I don’t know,” Shumann said. “If we can’t get it qualified, that’s all there is to it. But if we can...” He smoked. The jumper swabbed carefully and viciously at his leg. “There’s two things I could do,” Shumann said. “It will qualify under five hundred and seventy-five cubic inches. I could enter it in that and loaf back on half throttle and take third without having to make a vertical turn, and the purse to-morrow is eight-ninety. Or I could enter the other, the Trophy. It will be the only thing out there that will even stay in sight of Ord. And Ord is just in it so his home folks can see him fly; I don’t believe he would beat that Ninety-Two to death just to win two thousand dollars. Not on a five-mile course. Because it must be fast. We would be fixed then.”

  “Yes; fixed. We’d owe Ord about five thousand for the crate and the motor. What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask Ord. All I know is what Ord told him” — he made a brief indescribable motion with his head as though to indicate the room but which indicated the reporter as plainly as if Shumann had spoken his name—” he said the controls cross when it lands. Whether it’s slowin
g up or whether it’s the air off the ground. Because he said that Ord stalled it out when he... Or maybe a different weight distribution, a couple of sandbags in the—”

  “Yair. Or maybe when he gets it qualified to-morrow he will have them move the pylons up to around four thousand feet and hold the race up there instead of at General Behindman’s country club.” He ceased and bent over his leg again, then Shumann also saw Jiggs. He had apparently been in the room for some time, standing beside the table with two of the jam glasses, one of them containing water, in his hands. Shumann went to the table and poured into the empty glass and looked at Jiggs who now mused upon the drink.

  “Ain’t that enough?” Shumann said.

  “Yair,” Jiggs said, rousing; “yair.” When he poured water from the other glass into the drink the two rims clicked together with a faint chattering. Shumann watched him set the water glass down, where it chattered again on the table before he released it, and then with both hands attempt to raise the other one to his lips. As the glass approached Jiggs’ whole head began to jerk so that he could not make contact with his mouth, the rim of the glass clicking against his teeth while he tried to still it. “Jesus,” he said quietly, “Jesus. I tried for two hours to sit on the bed because when I would walk up and down the guy would come and hollar at me through the bars.”

  “Here,” Shumann said. He put his hand on the glass and stopped it and tilted it; he could watch Jiggs swallowing now and the liquid trickling down his blue-stubbled chin from each corner of his mouth and splotching dark on his shirt until Jiggs pushed the glass away, panting.

  “Wait,” he said. “It’s wasting. Maybe if you won’t look at me I can drink it.”

  “And then get on the sandwich again,” Shumann said. He took the jug from the table and looked back at the jumper again. “Go on and take the bed to-night,” he said. “You’ll have that leg infected under a blanket. Are you going to put the bandage back on?”

  “I’ll sleep in a cuckold’s bed but not in a pimp’s,” the jumper said. “Go on. Get yourself a piece to take to hell with you to-morrow.”

  “I can take third in the five-seventy-five without even crossing the airport,” Shumann said. “Anyway, by the time it is qualified I’ll know whether I can land it or not.... How about putting that bandage back on?” But the jumper did not answer or even look at him. The blanket was already turned back; with the injured leg swinging stiffly he turned on the ball of his buttocks and swung into the cot and drew the blanket up in one motion. For awhile longer Shumann looked at him, the jug against his leg. Then he realized that for some time he had been hearing Jiggs chewing and he looked at him and saw Jiggs squatting on the floor beside the canvas bag, chewing, holding the sandwich in both hands. “You, too,” Shumann said. “You going to sleep there?” Jiggs looked up at him with the one eye. His whole face was swollen and puffed now; he chewed slowly and gingerly, looking up at Shumann with that dog-like quality, abject, sad, and at peace. “Go on,” Shumann said. “Get settled. I’m going to turn out the light.” Without ceasing to chew Jiggs disengaged one hand and dragged the canvas sack over and lay down, his head upon it. Shumann could still hear him chewing as he groped in the darkness towards the curtain and lifted it and passed beyond it. Groping on to the lamp beside the bed, moving quietly now, he snapped it on and found the woman, the boy asleep beside her, watching him. She lay in the middle of the bed with the boy between her and the wall. Her clothes were laid neatly too on a chair and then Shumann saw the nightgown, the only silk one she had, lying across the chair too. Stooping to set the jug beneath the bed he paused and then lifted from the floor the cotton shorts which she wore, or had worn, from where they had either been dropped or flung, and put them on the chair too. He removed his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt while she watched him, the bedclothes huddled to her chin.

  “So you got the ship,” she said.

  “I don’t know. We’re going to try.” He removed the watch from his wrist and wound it carefully and put it on the table; when the faint clicking ceased he could hear again from beyond the curtain the sound of Jiggs chewing. He set his feet in turn on the corner of the chair and unlaced his shoes, feeling her watching him. “I can take at least third in the five-seventy-five without passing the pylons close enough for anybody on them to read the ship’s number. And that’s fifteen per cent, of eight-ninety. Or there’s two thousand in the Trophy and I don’t believe Ord will—”

  “Yes. I heard you through the curtain. But why?” He set the shoes neatly side by side and stepping out of his trousers shook them into crease by the cuffs, folded them, and put them on the chest of drawers beside the celluloid comb and brush and the cravat, and stood in shorts. “And the ship is all right except you won’t know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you won’t know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it.”

  “I guess I can land it, all right.” He lit? cigarette and then stood with his hand on the light-switch, looking at her. She had not moved, lying with the covers drawn smooth and nun-like up to her chin. Again from beyond the curtain he could hear Jiggs chewing, mouthing at the bard sandwich with that painful patience.

  “You’re lying,” she said. “We got along before.”

  “Because we had to. This time we don’t have to.”

  “But it’s seven months yet.”

  “Yair. Just seven months. And one more meet, and the only ship we have with a shot engine and two wrenched longerons.” He looked at her a moment longer; at last she opened the covers; as he snapped off the light his retina carried into the darkness the imprint of one bare shoulder and breast down to the waist. Want to move Jack to the middle?” he said. She did not answer, though it was not until he drew the covers up himself discovered that she was lying rigid, her flank tense and hard with rigid muscles where his own touched it as he settled himself. He withdrew the cigarette and held it suspended above his mouth, hearing Jiggs chewing beyond the curtain and then the jumpers voice: “Jesus God, stop eating that! You sound just like a dog.”

  “You bastard,” she said in a tense rigid whisper. “You rotten pilot, you bastard rotten pilot. Hanging off there with a dead stick so you wouldn’t interfere in their damn race and then mushing in over that sea-wall and you wouldn’t even hold its head up! you wouldn’t even hold—” Her hand shot out and snatched the cigarette from him; he felt his own fingers wrench and bend and then saw the red coal twinkle and arc across the dark and strike the invisible floor.

  “Here,” he whispered. “Let me pick it up off the...” But now the hard hand struck his cheek, clutching and scrabbling about his jaw and throat and shoulder until he caught it and held it, wrenching and jerking.

  “You bastard rotten, you rotten—” she panted.

  “All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” She ceased, breathing hard and fast. But he still held the wrist, wary and without gentleness too. “All right, now....You want to take your pants off?”

  “They’re already off.”

  “Oh yair,” he said. “I forgot.”

  When she made her first parachute jump they had not been together very long. She was the one who suggested that he teach her to jump, and he already had a parachute, the exhibition kind; when he used it he either flew the aeroplane or made the jump, depending on whether the casual partner with whom he would join forces for a day or a week or a season were a pilot himself or not. She made the suggestion herself and he showed her, drilled her in the simple mechanics of climbing out on to the wing with the parachute harness buckled on and then dropping off and letting her own weight pull the parachute from the case attached to the wing.

  The act was billed for a Saturday afternoon in a small Kansas town and he did not know that she was frightened until they were in the air, the money collected and the crowd waiting, and she had begun to climb out along the wing. She wore skirts; they had decided that her exposed legs would notdrawing card but that in the skirt n
o one would doubt that she was a woman; and now she was clinging to the inner bay strut and looking back at him with an expression that he was later to realize was not at all fear of death but on the contrary a wild and now mindless repudiation of bereavement as if it were he who was the one about to die and not her. He sat in the back cockpit with the aeroplane in position, holding the wing up under her weight, gesturing her on out towards the wing-tip, almost angrily, when he saw her leave the strut and with that blind and completely irrational expression of protest and wild denial on her face, the hem of the skirt, whipping out of the parachute harness about her loins, climb, not back into the front seat which she had left but on towards the one in which he sat holding the aeroplane level, scrambling and sprawling into the cock-pit (he saw her knuckles perfectly white where she gripped the cockpit’s edge) and then facing him.

  She told him later that she had not planned or thought at all until she looked back at him from the strut and realized that she might have to die before she touched him again. So he tried to fight her off for awhile but he had to fly the aeroplane, keep it in position over the field. It was some blind instinct that made him remember to roll the aeroplane towards the wing to which the parachute-case was attached because the next that he remembered was the belt catching him across the legs as, looking out, he saw the parachute floating between him and the ground.