He folded the paper neatly and returned to the corridor, where one glance into the dark city-room showed him that the women were done. “Yair. It’s making towards four,” he thought, wondering if it were actually dawn which he felt, or that anyway the dark globe on which people lived had passed the dead point at which the ill and the weary were supposed to be prone to die and now it was beginning to turn again, soon beginning to spin again out of the last laggard reluctance of darkness — the garblement which was the city: the scabby hop poles which elevated the ragged palm-crests like the monstrous broom-sage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night’s clatterfalque Nile barge supine now beneath today’s white wings treading, the hydrant gouts gutter plaited with the trodden tinsel-dung of stars. “And at Alphonse’s and Renaud’s the waiters that can not only understand Mississippi Valley French but they can even fetch back from the kitchen what you were not so sure yourself you told them to,” he thought, passing among the desks by feel now and rolling the paper into his coat for pillow before stretching out on the floor. “Yair,” he thought, “in bed now, and he will come in and she will say Did you get it? and he will say What? Get what? Ob, you mean the ship. Yair, we got it. That’s what we went over there for.”
It was not the sun that waked him, nor what would have been the sun save for the usual winter morning’s overcast: he just waked, regardless of the fact that during the past forty-eight hours he had slept but little more than he had eaten, like so many people who, living always on the outside of the mechanical regimentation of hours, seem able at need to coincide with a given moment a sort of unflagging instinctive facility. But the train would be ordered by mechanical postulation, and there would be no watch or clock in the building yet. Gaunt, worn ( he had not even paused to wash his face), he ran down the stairs and along the street itself; still running he turned in this side of the window and the immemorial grape-fruit halves which apparently each morning at the same moment at which the street lamps went out would be set out, age-and time-proved for intactness and imperviousness like the peasant vases exhumed from Greek and Roman ruins, between the paper poinsettias and the easel bearing the names of food printed upon interchangeable metal strips. In the city-room they called it the Dirty Spoon: one of ten thousand narrow tunnels furnished with a counter, a row of buttock-polished backless stools, a coffee urn and a Greek proprietor resembling a retired wrestler adjacent to ten thousand newspapers and dubbed by ten thousand variations about the land; the same thick-bodied Greek in the same soiled drill jacket might have looked at him across the same glass coffin filled with bowls of cereal and oranges and plates of buns apparently exhumed along with the grape-fruit in the window, only just this moment varnished. Then the reporter was able to see the clock on the rear wall; it was only fifteen past seven. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
“Coffee?” the Greek said.
“Yair,” the reporter said. “I ought to eat too,” he thought. Looking down into the glass-walled and topped gutter beneath his hands, not with any revulsion now, but with a kind of delicate distasteful abstemiousness like the old women in novels. And not from impatience, hurry: just as last night he seemed to see his blind furious course circling implacably back to the point where he had lost control of it like a kind of spiritual ground-loop, now he seemed to feel it straighten out at last, already lifting him steadily and undeviatingly onward so that now he need make no effort to move with it; all he had to do now was to remember to carry along with him everything which he was likely to need because this time he was not coming back.
“Gimme one of these,” he said, tapping the glass with one hand while with the other he touched, felt, the folded slip of paper in his watch-pocket. He ate the bun along with his coffee, tasting neither, feeling only the coffee’s warmth; it was now twenty-five past seven. “I can walk,” he thought. The overcast would burn away later. But it still lay overhead when he entered the station where Shumann rose from the bench. “Had some breakfast yet?” the reporter said.
“Yes,” Shumann said. The reporter looked at the other with a kind of bright grave intensity.
“Come on,” he said. “We can get on now.” The lights still burned in the train shed; the skylight was the same colour of the sky outside. “It will be gone soon though,” the reporter said. “Maybe by the time we get there; you will probably fly the ship back in the sun. Just think of that.” But it was gone before that; it was gone when they ran clear of the city; the car (they had the entire end of it to themselves) ran almost at once into thin sunlight. “I told you you would fly back in the sunshine,” the reporter said. “I guess we had better fix this up now, too.” He took out the note; he watched with that grave bright intensity while Shumann read it and then seemed to muse upon it soberly.
“Five thousand,” Shumann said. “That’s...”
“High?” the reporter said. “Yair. I didn’t want there to be any hitch until we got into the air with it, got back to the airport with it. To look like a price that even Marchand wouldn’t dare refuse to...” He watched Shumann, bright, quiet, grave.
“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see.” He reached into his coat. Then perhaps it was the fountain pen, though the reporter did not move yet and the brightness and intensity and gravity had not altered as he watched the deliberate, unhurried, slightly awkward movement of the pen across the blank signature line beneath the one where he had signed, watching the letters emerge: Roger Shumann. But he did not move even then; it was not until the pen without stopping dropped down to the third line and was writing again that he leaned and stopped it with his hand, looking at the half-finished third name: Dr. Carl S —
“Wait,” he said. “What’s that?”
“It’s my father’s name.”
“Would he let you sign it on this?”
“He’d have to, after it was done. Yes. He would help you out on it.”
“Help me out on it?”
“I wouldn’t be worth even five hundred unless I managed to finish that race first.” A train-man passed, swinging from seat-back to seat-back, pausing above them for a moment.
“Blaisedell,” he said. “Blaisedell.”
“Wait,” the reporter said. “Maybe I didn’t understand. I ain’t a flyer; all I know is that hour’s dual Matt gave me that time. I thought maybe what Matt meant was he didn’t want to risk having the under-carriage busted or the propeller bent or maybe a wing-tip....” He looked at Shumann, bright, grave, his hand still holding Shumann’s wrist.
“I guess I can land it all right,” Shumann said. But the reporter did not move, looking at Shumann.
“Then it will be all right? It’ll just be landing it, like what Matt said about the time he landed it?”
“I guess so,” Shumann said. The train began to slow; the oleander bushes, the moss-hung live-oaks in which light threads of mist-snared gossamer glinted in the sun; the vine-shrouded station flowed up, slowing; it would not quite pass.
“Because, Jesus, it’s just the money prize; it’s just one afternoon. And Matt will help you build your ship back and you will be all set with it for the next meet.” They looked at one another.
“I guess I can get it back down,” Shumann said.
“Yair. But listen—”
“I can land it,” Shumann said; “All right,” the reporter said. He released the other’s wrist; the pen moved again, completing the signature steadily: Dr. Carl Shumann, by Roger Shumann. The reporter took the note, rising.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” They walked again; it was about a mile; presently the road ran beside the field beyond which they could see the buildings — the detached office, the shop, the hangar with a broad legend above the open doors: ORD-ATKINSON AIRCRAFT CORPORATION — all of pale brick, as neat as and apparently contemporaneous with Ord’s new house. Sitting on the ground a little back from the road they watched two mechanics wheel out the red-and-white monoplane with which Ord had set his record and start it and warm it, and then
they saw Ord himself come out of the office, get into the racer, taxi to the end of the field and turn and take off straight over their heads, already travelling a hundred feet ahead of his own sound. “It’s forty miles over to Feinman from here,” the reporter said. “He flies it in ten minutes. Come on. You let me do the talking. Jesus,” he cried, in a kind of light amazed exultation, “I never told a lie in my life that anybody believed; maybe this is what I have been needing all the time!” When they reached the hangar the doors were now closed to a crack just large enough for a man to enter. Shumann entered, already looking about, until he found the aeroplane — a low-wing monoplane with a big nose and a tubular fuselage ending in a curiously flattened tail-group which gave it the appearance of having been drawn lightly and steadily through a huge lightly-closed gloved fist. “There it is,” the reporter said.
“Yair,” Shumann said. “I see.... Yes,” he thought, looking quietly at the queer empennage, the blunt short cylindrical body; “I guess Ord wasn’t so surprised, at that.” Then he heard the reporter speaking to someone and he turned and saw a squat man with a shrewd Cajun face above a scrupulously clean coverall.
“This is Mr. Shumann,” the reporter said, saying in a tone of bright amazement: “You mean Matt never told you? We have bought that ship.” Shumann did not wait. For a moment he watched Marchand, the note in both hands, looking at it with that baffled immobility behind which the mind flicks and darts like a terrier inside a fence.
“Yair,” Shumann thought, without grimness, “he can’t pass five thousand dollars any more than I could. Not without warning, anyway.” He went on to the aeroplane, though once or twice he looked back and saw Marchand and the reporter, the Cajun still emanating that stubborn and slowly crystallizing bewilderment while the reporter talked, flapped, before him with an illusion of being held together only by the clothes he wore; once he even heard the reporter:
“Sure, you could telephone to Feinman and catch him. But for God’s sake don’t let anybody overhear how Matt stuck us for five thousand bucks for the damn crate. He promised he wouldn’t tell.” But there was no telephoning done apparently, because almost at once (or so it seemed to Shumann) the reporter and Marchand were beside him, the reporter quiet now, watching him with that bright attention.
“Let’s get it out where we can look at it,” Shumann said. They rolled it out on to the apron, where it squatted again, seemed to. It had none of the wasp-waisted trimness of the ones at the airport. It was blunt, a little thick-bodied, almost sluggish looking; its lightness when moved by hand seemed curiously paradoxical. For a good minute the reporter and Marchand watched Shumann stand looking at it with thoughtful gravity. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s wind her up.” Now the reporter spoke, leaning lightly and slightly just off balance like a ragged penstaff dropped point first into the composition apron:
“Listen. You said last night maybe it was the distribution of the weight; you said how maybe if we could shift the weight somehow while it was in the air that maybe you could find...” Later (almost as soon as Shumann was out of sight the reporter and Marchand were in Marchand’s car on the road to the village, where the reporter hired a cab, scrambling into it even before he had asked the price and yelling out of his gaunt and glare-fixed face, “Hell, no! Not New Valois! Feinmann Airport!”) he lived and relived the blind timeless period during which he lay on his stomach in the barrel, clutching the two body members, with nothing to see but Shumann’s feet on the rudder pedals and the movement of the aileron balance-rod and nothing to feel but terrific motion — not speed and not progress — just blind, furious motion like a sealed force trying to explode the monococque barrel in which he lay from the waist down on his stomach, leaving him clinging to the body members in space. He was still thinking, “Jesus, maybe we are going to die and all it is is a taste like sour hot salt in your mouth,” even while looking out the car window at the speeding march and swamp through which they skirted the city, thinking with a fierce and triumphant conviction of immortality, “We flew it! We flew it!”
Now the airport; the forty miles accomplished before he knew it, what with his skull still cloudy with the light tag ends of velocity and speed like the drifting feathers from a shot bird so that he had never become conscious of the sheer inertia of dimension, space, distance, through which he had had to travel. He was thrusting the five-dollar bill at the driver before the car began to turn into the plaza and he was out of it before it had stopped, running towards the hangar, probably not even aware that the first race was in progress. Wild-faced, gaunt and sunken-eyed from lack of sleep and from strain, his clothes ballooning about him, he ran into the hangar and on to where Jiggs stood at the work-bench with a new bottle of polish and a new tin of paste open before him, shining the boots, working now with tedious and intent concern at the scar on the instep of the right one. “Did he—” the reporter cried.
“Yair, he landed it, all right,” Jiggs said. “He used all the field, though. Jesus, I thought for a while he was going to run out of airport before he even cut the gun; when he stopped you couldn’t have dropped a match between the prop and the sea wall. They are all upstairs now, holding the caucus.”
“It’ll qualify itself!” the reporter cried. “I told him that. I may not know aeroplanes but I know sewage Board Jews!”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Anyway, he won’t have to make but two landings with it. And he’s already made one of them.”
“Two?” the reporter cried; now he glared at Jiggs with more than exultation: with ecstasy. “He’s already made two! We made one before he left Ord’s!”
“We?” Jiggs said. With the boot and the rag poised he blinked painfully at the reporter with the one good hot bright eye. “We?”
“Yair; him and me! He said how it was the weight — that maybe if we could just shift the weight somehow while it was in the air — and he said, ‘Are you afraid?’ and I said, ‘Hell, yes. But not if you ain’t, because Matt gave me an hour once, or maybe if I had had more than an hour I wouldn’t have been.’ So Marchand helped us take the seat out and we rigged another one so there would be room under it for me and I slid back into the fuselage because it ain’t got any cross-bracing, it’s mon — mon—”
“Monococque,” Jiggs said. “Jesus Christ, do you mean—”
“Yair. And him and Marchand rigged the seat again and he showed me where to hold on and I could just see his heels and that was all; I couldn’t tell; yair, after a while I knew we were flying, but I couldn’t tell forward nor backward or anything because, Jesus, I just had one hour with Matt and then he cut the gun and then I could hear him — Jesus, we might have been standing on the ground — he said quiet, ‘Now slide back. Easy. But hold tight.” And then I was hanging just by my hands; I wasn’t even touching the floor of it at all. Jesus, I was thinking, ‘Well, here it is then; it will be tough about that race this afternoon’; I didn’t even know we were on the ground again until I found out it was him and Marchand lifting the seat out and Marchand saying, ‘Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,’ and him looking at me and the bastard crate standing there quiet as one of them photographs on Grandlieu Street, and then he says, ‘Would you go up again?’ and I said, ‘Yes. You want to go now?’ and he said, ‘Let’s get her on over to the field and qualify.’”
“Sweet Jesus Christ,” Jiggs said.
“Yair,” the reporter cried. “It was just weight distribution: him and Marchand rigged up a truck inner tube full of sand on a pulley so he can — And put the seat back and even if they see the end of the cable they wouldn’t — Because the only ship in it that can beat him is Ord’s and the purse ain’t but two thousand and Ord don’t need it, he is only in it so New Valois folks can see him fly the Ninety-Two once, and he ain’t going to beat that fifteen-thousand-dollar ship to death just to—”
“Here; here,” Jiggs said. “You’re going to blow all to pieces in a minute. Smoke a cigarette; ain’t you got some?” The reporter fumbled the cigarettes out at l
ast, though it was Jiggs who took two from the pack and struck the match while the reporter stooped to it, trembling. The dazed, spent, wild look was still on his face, but he was quieter now.
“So they were all out to meet him, were they?”
“Jesus, did they,” Jiggs said. “And Ord out in front; he recognized the ship as soon as it come in sight; Jesus, I bet he recognized it before Roger even recognized the airport, and by the time he landed you would have thought he was Lindbergh. And him sitting there in the cockpit and looking at them and Ord hollering at him and then they all come back up the apron like Roger was a kidnapper or something and went into the administration building and a minute later the microphone begun to holler for the inspector, what’s his—”
“Sales,” the reporter said. “It’s licensed; they can’t stop him.”
“Sales can ground it, though,” Jiggs said.
“Yair.” The reporter was already turning, moving. “But Sales ain’t nothing but a Federal officer; Feinman is a Jew and on the sewage board.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 189