“Art Jackson. A stunt flyer.”
“I’ll see if there is any record. The meet was over yesterday.” The clerk left the window. The reporter leaned in it, not panting, just completely motionless until the clerk returned.
“There is an Arthur Jackson registered as staying at the Bienville hotel yesterday. But whether or not he is—” But the reporter was gone, not running, but walking fast, back towards the entrance; a porter with a long-handled brush sweeping the floor jerked it back just before the reporter was about to walk through the brush-handle as if it were a spiderweb. The taxi-driver did not know exactly where the Bienville was, but at last they found it — a side street, a sign reading mostly Turkish Bath, then a narrow entrance, a corridor dimly lighted and containing a few chairs, a few palms, more spittoons than either, and a desk beside which a negro in no uniform slept — a place ambiguous, redolent of hard Saturday nights, whose customers seldom had any baggage and beyond the turnings of whose dim and threadbare corridors there seemed to whisk for ever bright tawdry kimonos in a kind of hopeful nostalgic convocation of all the bought female flesh which ever breathed and perished. The negro waked; there was no elevator; the reporter was directed to the room from his description of Jiggs and knocked beneath the ghost of two numbers attached to the door’s surface by the ghost of four tacks until the door opened and Jiggs blinked at him with the good eye and the injured one, wearing now only the shirt. The reporter held in his hand the slip of paper which had been clipped to the money the jumper gave him. He did not blink, himself: he just stared at Jiggs with that desperate urgency.
“The tickets,” he said. “Where—”
“Oh,” Jiggs said. “Myron, Ohio. Yair, that’s it on the paper.
Roger’s old man. They’re going to leave the kid there. I thought you knew. You said you saw Jack at the — Here, doc! What is this?” He opened the door wider and put out his hand, but the reporter had already caught the door-jamb. “You come on in and set down a—”
“Myron, Ohio,” the reporter said. His face wore again that faint wrung quiet grimace as with the other hand he continued to try to put Jiggs’ hand aside even after Jiggs was no longer offering to touch him. He began to apologize to Jiggs for having disturbed him, talking through that thin wash over his wasted gaunt face which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“It’s all right, doc,” Jiggs said, watching him, blinking still with a sort of brutal concern. “Jesus, ain’t you been to bed yet? Here; you better come in here; me and Art can make room—”
“Yes, I’ll be getting on.” He pushed himself carefully back from the door as though he were balancing himself before turning the door loose, feeling Jiggs watching him. “I just happened to drop in. To say good-bye.” He looked at Jiggs with that thin fixed grimace while Jiggs blinked at him.
“Good-bye, doc. Only you better—”
“And good luck to you. Or do you say happy landings to a parachute jumper?”
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “I hope so.”
“Then happy landings too.”
“Yair. Thanks. The same to you, doc.” The reporter turned away. Jiggs watched him go down the corridor, walking with that curious light stiff care, and turn the corner and vanish. The light was even dimmer on the stairs than it had been in the corridor, though the brass strips which bound the rubber tread to each step glinted bright and still in the centre where the heels had kept it polished. The negro was already asleep again in the chair beside the desk; he did not stir as the reporter passed him and went on and got into the cab, stumbling a little on the step.
“Back to the airport,” he said. “You needn’t hurry. We got until daylight.” He was back on the beach before daylight, though it was dawn before the other four saw him again, before they came out of the dark lunch-stand and passed again through another barricade of parked cars (though not so many this time since it was now Monday), and descended to the beach. They saw him then. The smooth water was a pale rose colour from the waxing east, so that the reporter in silhouette against it resembled a tatting Christmas gift made by a little girl and supposed to represent a sleeping crane.
“Good Lord,” the third said. “You suppose he has been down here by himself all the time?” But they did not have much time to wonder about it; they were barely on time themselves; they heard the aeroplane taking off before they reached the beach and then they watched it circling; it came over into what they thought was position and the sound of the engine died for a time and then began again and the aeroplane went on, though nothing else happened. They saw nothing fall from it at all, they just saw three gulls converge suddenly from nowhere and begin to slant and tilt and scream above a spot on the water some distance away, making a sound like rusty shutters in a wind. “So that’s that,” the third said. “Let’s go to town.” Again the fourth one spoke the reporter’s name.
“Are we going to wait for him?” he said. They looked back, but the reporter was gone.
“He must have got a ride with somebody,” the third said. “Come on. Let’s go.”
When the reporter got out of the car at the Saint Jules Avenue corner the clock beyond the restaurant’s window said eight o’clock. He did not look at the clock; he was looking at nothing for the time, shaking slowly and steadily. It was going to be another bright vivid day; the sunlight, the streets and walls themselves emanated that brisk up-and-doing sobriety of Monday morning. But he was not looking at that either; he was not looking at anything. When he began to see it was as if the letters were beginning to emerge from the back of his skull — the broad page under a rusting horseshoe, the quality of grateful astonishment which Monday headlines have like when you learn that the uncle whom you believed to have perished two years ago in a poor-house fire died yesterday in Tucson, Arizona and left you five hundred dollars:
AVIATOR’S BODY RESIGNED TO LAKE GRAVE
Then he quit seeing it. He had not moved; his pupils would still have repeated the page in inverted miniature, but he was not seeing it at all, shaking quietly and steadily in the bright warm sun until he turned and looked into the window with an expression of quiet and bemused despair — the not-flies or were-flies, the two grape-fruit halves, the printed names of food like the printed stations in a train schedule and set on an easel like a family portrait — and experienced not only that profound and unshakable reluctance but actual absolute refusal of his entire organism. “All right,” he said. “If I won’t eat, then I am going to take a drink. If I won’t go in here then I am going to Joe’s.” It was not far: just down an alley and through a barred door — one of the places where for fifteen years the United States had tried to keep them from selling whiskey and where for one year now it had been trying to make them sell it. The porter let him in and poured him a drink in the empty bar while starting the cork in another bottle. “Yair,” the reporter said. “I was on the wagon for an entire day. Would you believe that?”
“Not about you,” the porter said.
“Neither would I. It surprised me. It surprised the hell out of me until I found out it was two other guys. See?” He laughed too; it wasn’t loud; it still didn’t seem loud even after the porter was holding him up, calling him by name too, mister too, like Leonora, saying:
“Come on, now; try to quit now.”
“All right,” the reporter said. “I’ve quit now. If you ever saw any man quitter than me right now I will buy you an aeroplane.”
“O.K.,” the porter said. “Only make it a taxi-cab and you go on home.”
“Home? I just come from home. I’m going to work now. I’m O.K. now. Give me another shot and just point me towards the door and I will be all right. All right, see? Then I learned by mistake that it was two other guys—” But he stopped himself, this time; he held himself fine while the porter poured the other drink and brought it to him. He had himself in hand fine now; he did not feel at all: just the liquor flowing slowly down him, fiery, dead, and cold. Soon he would even quit shaking, s
oon he did quit; walking now with the bright unsoiled morning falling upon him he did not have anything to shake with. “So I feel better,” he said. Then he began to say it fast: “Oh God, I feel better! I feel better! I feel! I feel!” until he quit that too and said quietly, with tragic and passive clairvoyance, looking at the familiar wall, the familiar twin door through which he was about to pass: “Something is going to happen to me. I have got myself stretched out too far and too thin and something is going to bust.”
He mounted the quiet stairs; in the empty corridor he drank from the bottle, though this time it was merely cold and felt like water. But when he entered the deserted city room he remembered that he could have drunk here just as well, and so he did. “I see so little of it,” he said. “I don’t know the family’s habits yet.” But it was empty, or comparatively so, because he kept on making that vertical reverse without any rudder or flippers and looking down on the close-peopled land and the empty lake and deciding, and the dredge-boat hanging over him for twenty hours and then having to lie there too and look up at the wreath dissolving, faintly rocking and stared at by gulls, away and trying to explain that he did not know. “I didn’t think of that!” he cried. “I just thought they were all going. I don’t know where, but I thought that all three of them, that maybe the hundred and seventy-five would be enough until Homes could... and that then he would be big enough and I would be there; I would maybe see her first and she would not look different even though he was out there around the pylon, and so I wouldn’t either even if I was forty-two instead of twenty-eight, and he would come on in off the pylons and we would go up and she maybe holding my arm and him looking at us over the cockpit and she would say, ‘This is the one back in New Valois that time. That used to buy you the ice-cream.’”
Then he had to hurry, saying, “Wait. Stop now. Stop,” until he did stop, tall, humped a little, moving his mouth faintly as if he were tasting, blinking fast now and now stretching his eyelids to their full extent like a man trying to keep himself awake while driving a car; again it tasted, felt, like so much dead icy water, cold and heavy and lifeless in his stomach; when he moved he could both hear and feel it sluggish and dead within him as he removed his coat and hung it on the chairback and sat down and racked a sheet of yellow paper into the machine. He could not feel his fingers on the keys either; he just watched the letters materialize out of thin air, black, sharp and fast, along the creeping yellow.
During the night the little boy slept on the seat facing the woman and the parachute jumper, the toy aeroplane clutched to his chest; when daylight came the train was running in snow. They changed trains in snow too, and when in mid-afternoon the train-man called the town and looking out the window the woman read the name on the little station, it was snowing hard. They got out and crossed the platform, among the milk-cans and the fowl-crates, and entered the waiting-room where a porter was putting coal into the stove. “Can we get a cab here?” the jumper asked him.
“There’s one outside now,” the porter said. “I’ll call him.”
“Thanks,” the jumper said. The jumper looked at the woman; she was buttoning the trench-coat. “I’ll wait here,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “All right. I don’t know how—”
“I’ll wait. No use standing around anywhere else.”
“Ain’t he coming with us?” the little boy said. He looked at the jumper, the toy aeroplane under his arm now, though he still spoke to the woman. “Don’t he want to see Roger’s old man too?”
“No,” the woman said. “You tell him good-bye now.”
“Good-bye?” the boy said. He looked from one to the other. “Ain’t we coming back?” He looked from one to the other. “I’ll stay here with him until you get back. I’ll see Roger’s old man some other time.”
“No,” the woman said. “Now.” The boy looked from one to the other. Suddenly the jumper said:
“So long, kid. I’ll be seeing you.”
“You’re going to wait? You ain’t going off?”
“No. I’ll wait. You and Laverne go on.” The porter came in.
“He’s waiting for you folks,” he said.
“The cab’s waiting,” the woman said. “Tell Jack so long.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You wait here for us. Soon as we get back we’ll eat.”
“Yair; sure,” the jumper said. Suddenly he set the bag down and stooped and picked the boy up.
“No,” the woman said; “you wait here out of the—” But the jumper went on, carrying the little boy, swinging his stiff leg along. The woman followed him, into the snow again. The cab was a small touring car with a lettered sign on the wind-shield and a blanket over the hood and driven by a man with a scraggly greyish moustache. The driver opened the door; the jumper swung the boy in, stepped back and helped the woman in, and leaned again into the door; now his face wore an expression which anyone who had seen very much of the reporter lately would have recognized — that faint grimace (in this instance savage too) which would have been called smiling for lack of anything better.
“So long, old fellow,” he said. “Be good now.”
“O.K.,” the boy said. “You be looking around for somewhere to eat before we get back.”
“O.K.,” the jumper said.
“All right, mister,” the woman said. “Let’s go.” The car moved, swinging away from the station; the woman was still leaning forward. “Do you know where Doctor Carl Shumann lives?” she said. For an instant the driver did not move. The car still swung on, gaining speed, and there was little possible moving for the driver to do. Yet during that moment he seemed to have become caught in that sort of instantaneous immobility like when a sudden light surprises a man or an animal out of darkness. Then it was gone.
“Doctor Shumann? Sure. You want to go there?”
“Yes,” the woman said. It was not far; the town was not large; it seemed to the woman that almost at once the car had stopped, and looking out through the falling snow she saw a kind of cenotaph, penurious and without majesty or dignity, of forlorn and victorious desolation — a bungalow, a tight flimsy mass of stoops and porte-cochères and flat gables and bays not five years old and built in that coloured mud-and-chicken-wire tradition which California moving-picture films have scattered across North America as if the celluloid carried germs. It was not five years old, yet it wore already an air of dilapidation and rot; a quality furious and recent as if immediate disintegration had been included in the architect’s blueprints and inherent in the wood and plaster and sand of its mushroom growth. Then she found the driver looking at her.
“This is it,” he said. “Or maybe you were thinking about his old place? or are you acquainted with him that well?”
“No,” the woman said. “This is it.” He made no move to open the door; he just sat half-turned, watching her struggling with the door handle.
“He used to have a big old place out in the country until he lost it a few years back. His son took up av-aytion and he mortgaged the place to buy his son a flying machine and then his son wrecked the machine and so the doctor had to borrow some more money on the place to fix the machine up. I guess the boy aimed to pay it back but he just never got around to it maybe. So he lost the old place and built this one. Prob’ly this one suits him just as well, though; womenfolks usually like to live close to town—” But she had got the door open now and she and the boy got out.
“Do you mind waiting?” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll pay you for the time.”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s my business. What you do with the car while you are hiring it is yours, not mine.” He watched them enter the gate and go on up the narrow concrete walk in the snow. “So that’s her,” he thought. “Only she don’t look a whole lot like a widow. But then I hear tell she never acted a whole lot like a wife.” He had a robe, another horse-blanket, in the seat beside him. He bundled himself into it, which was just as well because dark had come and the snow drifted a
nd whirled, funnelled now by the down-glare of a street-lamp nearby before the door opened and he recognized against the light the silhouette of the trench-coat and then that of Doctor Shumann as they came out and the door shut behind them. He threw the robe off and started the engine. But after a while he cut the switch and drew the robe about him again, though it was too dark and the snow was falling too fast for him to see the two people standing on the stoop before the entrance of the house.
“You are going to leave him like this?” Dr. Shumann said. “You are going to leave him asleep and go away?”
“Can you think of any better way?” she said.
“No. That’s true.” He was speaking loudly, too loudly. “Let us understand one another. You leave him here of your own free will; we are to make a home for him until we die: that is understood.”
“Yes. I agreed to that inside,” she said patiently.
“No; but let us understand. I” He talked in that curious, loud, wild, rushing manner, as though she were still moving away and were at some distance now: “We are old; you cannot understand that, that you will or can ever reach a time when you can bear so much and no more; that nothing else is worth the bearing; that you not only cannot, you will not; that nothing is worth anything but peace, peace, peace, even with bereavement and grief — nothing! nothing! But we have reached that stage. When you came here with Roger that day before the boy was born, you and I talked and I talked different to you. I was different then; I meant it when you told me you did not know whether or not Roger was the father of your unborn child and that you would never know, and I told you, do you remember?
I said, ‘Then make Roger his father from now on.’ And you told me the truth that you would not promise, that you were born bad and could not help it or did not think you were going to try to help it; and I told you nobody is born anything, bad or good, God help us, any more than anybody can do anything save what they must: do you remember? I meant that then. But I was younger then. And now I am not young. And now I can’t — I cannot — I”
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 196