“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 trenchcoat 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 oclock. We have got to pull all those valves today.” 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.”
“Dont either of them know where he went?” the woman said.
“I dont know,” Shumann said. “They say they dont.”
“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 oclock.”
“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 toward 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; tomorrow,” 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 did I.”
“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 today? I aint trying to stop you because I know I cant, 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.”
“Dont you worry about me,” Jiggs said. “Jesus, dont 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 hat sank from sight. Then Jiggs moved with rubbersoled 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 wash-stand, 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 madeup, 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 heeltap, scrubbing at the mark with the damp towel. “Maybe it wont 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 dishpan 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 cigarbox containing a cake of laundry soap and a cheap straight razor and a pair of pliers and a spool of safetywire, 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 that particular jug. It was not the present need for another drink that he was running from. “I aint running from that,” he told himself, hurrying down the corridor toward the street door. “It’s because even if I am a bum there is some crap I will not eat,” he cried out of the still white glare of honor 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 Jiggs’ feet as he had at the feet of the others when the parachute jumper opened the door five minutes before and Shumann dragged the reporter up and the door of its own weight swung to behind them and the reporter half lay again in the frame of it, his nondescript hair broken down about his brow and his eyes closed and peaceful and his shirt and awry tie stiff and sour with vomit until Jiggs in turn jerked open the door and 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 midair above the two men in the doorway; that his own body had become corrupt too and without consulting him at all had made that catlike turn in midair 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.
“Go on,” the jumper said. “See what he’s got or get away and let me do it.”
“Wait,” Jiggs said. “Let’s find some way to get him back into the house first.” He leaned across
them and tried the door again. He could even see the key now, still on the table beside the jug—an object trivial in size, that a man could almost swallow without it hurting him much probably and which now, even more than the jug, symbolised taunting and fierce regret since it postulated frustration not in miles but in inches; the gambit itself had refused, confounding him and leaving him hung up on a son of a bitch who couldn’t even get into his own house.
“Come on,” the jumper said to Shumann. “See what he’s got—unless somebody has already beat us to him.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said, putting his hand on the reporter’s flank. “But if we could just find some way to get him back into the house——” The jumper caught him by the shoulder and jerked him backward; again Jiggs caught balance, bouncing back, and saw the woman catch the jumper’s arm as the jumper reached toward the reporter’s pocket.
“Get away yourself,” she said. The jumper rose; he and the woman glared at one another—the one cold, hard, calm; the other tense, furious, restrained. Shumann had risen too; Jiggs looked quietly and intently from him to the others and back again.
“So you’re going to do it yourself,” the jumper said.
“Yes. I’m going to do it myself.” They stared at one another for an instant longer, then they began to curse each other in short hard staccato syllables that sounded like slaps while Jiggs, his hands on his hips and leaning a little forward on his lightpoised rubber soles, looked from them to Shumann and back again.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That’ll do now.” He stepped between them, shoving the jumper a little. Then the woman stooped and while Jiggs turned the reporter’s inert body from thigh to thigh she took from his pockets a few crumpled bills and a handfull of silver.
“There’s a five and four ones,” Jiggs said. “Let me count that change.”
“Three will pay the bus,” Shumann said. “Just take three more.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Seven or eight will be a plenty. Look. Leave him the five and one of the ones for change.” He took the five and one of the ones from the woman’s hand and folded them and thrust them into the reporter’s fob pocket and was about to rise when he saw the reporter looking at him, lying sprawled in the door with his eyes open and quiet and profoundly empty—that vision without contact yet with mind or thought, like two dead electric bulbs set into his skull. “Look,” Jiggs said, “he’s——” He sprang up, then he saw the jumper’s face for the second before the jumper caught the woman’s wrist and wrenched the money from her hand and flung it like a handfull of gravel against the reporter’s peaceful and openeyed and sightless face and said in a tone of thin and despairing fury,
“I will eat and sleep on Roger and I will eat and sleep on you. But I wont eat and sleep on your ass, see?” He took up his bag and turned; he walked fast; Jiggs and the little boy watched him turn the alley mouth and vanish. Then Jiggs looked back at the woman who had not moved and at Shumann kneeling and gathering up the scattered coins and bills from about the reporter’s motionless legs.
“Now we got to find some way to get him into the house,” Jiggs said. They did not answer. But then he did not seem to expect or desire any answer. He knelt too and began to pick up the scattered coins. “Jesus,” he said. “Jack sure threw them away. We’ll be lucky to find half of them.” But still they seemed to pay him no heed.
“How much was it?” Shumann said to the woman, extending his palm toward Jiggs.
“Six dollars and seventy cents,” the woman said. Jiggs put the coins into Shumann’s hand; as motionless as Shumann, Jiggs’ hot eyes watched Shumann count the coins by sight.
“All right,” Shumann said. “That other half.”
“I’ll just pick up some cigarettes with it,” Jiggs said. Now Shumann didn’t say anything at all; he just knelt with his hand out. After a moment Jiggs put the last coin into it. “O.K.,” Jiggs said. His hot bright eyes were now completely unreadable; he did not even watch Shumann put the money into his pocket, he just took up his canvas bag. “Too bad we aint got any way to get him off the street,” he said.
“Yair,” Shumann said, taking up the other bag. “We aint, though. So let’s go.” He went on; he didn’t even look back. “It’s a valvestem has stretched,” he said. “I’ll bet a quarter. That must be why she ran hot yesterday. We’ll have to pull them all.”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. He walked behind the others, carrying the canvas bag. He didn’t look back either yet; he stared at the back of Shumann’s head with intent secret speculation blank and even tranquil; he spoke to himself out of a sardonic reserve almost of humor: “Yair. I knew I would be sorry. Jesus, you would think I would have learned by now to save being honest for Sunday. Because I was all right until.……and now to be hung up on a bastard that.……” He looked back. The reporter still lay propped in the doorway; the quiet thoughtful empty eyes seemed still to watch them gravely, without either surprise or reproach. “Jesus,” Jiggs said aloud, “I told that guy last night it wasn’t paregoric: it was laudanum or something.……” because for a little while now he had forgot the jug, he was thinking about the reporter and not about the jug, until now. “And it wont be long now,” he thought, with a sort of desperate outrage, his face perfectly calm, the boots striking through the canvas sack, against his legs at each step as he walked behind the other three, his eyes hot blank and dead as if they had been reversed in his skull and only the blank backsides showed while sight contemplated the hot wild secret coiling of drink netted and snared by the fragile web of flesh and nerves in which he lived, resided. “I will call the paper and tell them he is sick,” he said out of that specious delusion of need and desire which even in this inviolable privacy brushed ruthlessly aside all admission of or awareness of lying or truth: “Maybe some of them will know some way to get in. I will tell him and Laverne that they asked me to wait and show them where.……” They reached the alley’s mouth. Without pausing Shumann craned and peered up the street where the jumper had vanished. “Get on,” Jiggs said. “We’ll find him at the bus stop. He aint going to walk out there no matter how much his feelings are hurt.” But the jumper was not at the bus stop. The bus was about to depart but the jumper was not in it. Another had gone ten minutes before and Shumann and the woman described the jumper to the starter and he had not been in that one either. “He must have decided to walk out, after all,” Jiggs said, moving toward the step. “Let’s grab a seat.”
“We might as well eat now,” Shumann said. “Maybe he will come along before the next bus leaves.”
“Sure,” Jiggs said. “We could ask the bus driver to start taking off the overhead.”
“Yes,” the woman said, suddenly. “We can eat out there.”
“We might miss him,” Shumann said. “And he hasn’t—”
“All right,” she said; she spoke in a cold harsh tone, without looking at Jiggs. “Do you think that Jack will need more watching this morning than he will?” Now Jiggs could feel Shumann looking at him too, thoughtfully from within the machinesymmetry of the new hat. But he did not move; he stood immobile, like one of the dummy figures which are wheeled out of slumdistrict stores and pawnshops at eight a.m., quiet waiting and tranquil; and bemused too, the in-turned vision watching something which was not even thought supplying him out of an inextricable whirl of half-caught pictures, like a roulette wheel bearing printed sentences in place of numbers, with furious tagends of plans and alternatives—telling them he had heard the jumper say he was going back to the place on Amboise street and that he, Jiggs, would go there and fetch him—of escaping even for five minutes and striking the first person he met and then the next and the next and the next until he got a half dollar; and lastly and this steadily, with a desperate conviction of truth and regret, that if Shumann would just hand him the coin and say go get a shot, he would not even take it, or lacking that, would take the one drink and then no more out of sheer gratitude for having been permitted to escape from impotence and need and thinking and calc
ulation by means of which he must even now keep his tone casual and innocent.
“Who, me?” he said. “Hell, I drank enough last night to do me a long time. Let’s get on; he must have deadheaded out somehow.”
“Yair,” Shumann said, still watching him with that open and deadly seriousness. “We got to pull those valves and mike them. Listen. If things break right today, tonight I’ll get you a bottle. O.K.?”
“Jesus,” Jiggs said. “Have I got to get drunk again? Is that it? Come on; let’s get a seat.” They got in. The bus moved. It was better then, because even if he had the half dollar he could not buy a drink with it until the bus either stopped or reached the airport, and also he was moving toward it at last; he thought again out of the thunder of solitude, the instant of exultation between the terror and the dismay: “They cant stop me. There aint enough of them to stop me. All I got to do is wait.”—“Yair,” he said, leaning forward between Shumann’s and the woman’s heads above the seatback in front of the one on which he and the boy sat, “he’s probably already on the ship. I’ll go right over and get on those valves and I can send him back to the restaurant.” But they did not find the jumper at once at the airport either, though Shumann stood for a while and looked about the forenoon’s deserted plaza as though he had expected to see the parachute jumper still in the succeeding elapsed second from that in which he had walked out of sight beyond the alley’s mouth. “I’ll go on and get started,” Jiggs said. “If he’s in the hangar I’ll send him on to the restaurant.”